In the video below, on the tenth of July 1997, prior to the Kyoto Climate conference, John Holdren confirmed a one degree Fahrenheit rise in world temperature over the previous hundred years, the same amount of warming previously announced in a Whitehouse statement some two years earlier. Tom Karl of NOAA spoke about about rainfall and various aspects of world climate but did not refer to world temperatures in his presentation until later after the Kyoto Protocol was proposed in December 1997 when he announced that global temperatures had actually risen by more than two degrees Fahrenheit.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?92578-1/science-global-climate-change

https://www.c-span.org/program/white-house-event/science-of-global-climate-change/169448

The above links will only work in a recent post “United States Not Concerned About Climate Change”

Karl’s higher temperature data was good news for president Clinton whose budget request for $6.3 billion hinged on approval from a hostile senate. His proposal called for five years for tax and research incentives to promote more energy- efficient products and technologies. Gore insisted U.S. industry had the expertise and ability to make affordable changes to combat global warming, saying, ‘We can do that. We know how to do that.’

“Worldwide average temperatures in the 1980s and the 1990s have been the highest on record, and the Earth’s average surface temperature last year of some 62 degrees Fahrenheit 62.45 Fahrenheit represented the highest level ever recorded. Federal researchers said new temperature records were set in five states in the first five months of 1998, with the average global surface temperature running 1.76 degrees above the average of 61.7 degrees for the benchmark period 1961-1990”.”Karl was later to apologise after realising he was using the wrong baseline reference:  Please note: the estimate for the baseline global temperature used in this study differed, and was warmer than, the baseline estimate (Jones et al., 1999) used currently. This report has been superseded by subsequent analyses. However, as with all climate monitoring reports, it is left online as it was written at the time”.  But not before the Kyoto Protocol was adopted on 11 December 1997. In short, the Kyoto Protocol operationalized the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change by committing industrialized countries and economies in transition to limit and reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions in accordance with agreed individual targets. The Convention itself only asked those countries to adopt policies and measures on mitigation and to report periodically. In 2015, at the sustainable development summit held in Paris, all UNFCCC participants signed yet another pact, the Paris Climate Agreement, which effectively replaced the Kyoto Protocol which was proposed in December 1997

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The Paris Conference, scheduled due to be held in late December 2015 might have been cancelled due to the lack of warming in the period between 1998-2014. According to NOAA’s own data, which was almost identical to the  World Meteorology Organisation (an agency of the UN)  which reported that there had been no significant increase in global temperatures during this period. Once again the possibility of a climate conference being cancelled looked likely until Tom Karl of NOAA was able to demonstrate, after reviewing reports, an increase in temperatures in each year by an average of 0.07 C thus paving the way for the conference to proceed.. The columns on the left of the chart show WMO data as almost identical to NOAA’s prior to Karl’s alterations.

The chart shows in RED the alterations made by Tom Karl of NOAA, prior to the Paris Conference in 2015. It was accepted at the conference even though it disagreed with all other temperature measuring authorities in particular the World Meteorology Organisation (WMO) who made no attempt to change its data. There waere opportunities to challenge Karl’s before the conference but it never happened.

There will continue to be reductions to Karl’s inflated data in subsequent NOAA climate reports which I suspect will continue to portray a more realistic record when compared with the WMO in future years.