Friday on MSNBC, climate activist Bill Nye warned conservatives to  watch out,  saying progressive blue states will  address climate change  on their own.Nye said,  Only 40 percent of people in the U.S. think that Congress should be addressing this and that s because certain conservative groups, especially from the fossil fuel industry, have been very successful in introducing the idea that scientific uncertainty, plus or minus two percent, is the same as plus or minus 100 percent. He continued,  There s a lot of emphasis from conservatives on what are writ-large states rights. Just watch out, conservatives, if states rights include California, Illinois, New York   these places that, where people voted in a progressive fashion   watch out if all those places start to address climate change and then impose economic sanctions, either overtly or by default, on places that have not embraced the work that needs to be done. Then you ll end up with this states rights working the other way. He added,  We ve got to remind people that we re all in this together. The people I think about all the time are what are eloquently stated as the hillbillies. We want to engage everybody. Not working to address climate change is in no one s best interest. It is not in the best interest, especially of your children and grandchildren. A couple of times you mentioned that I am against the president and so on. I m not especially against the president. I just think he s gotten himself surrounded by people who are willing to mortgage the future, to let the people who are coming into the workforce now pay for the future. This is true, not just with regard to the national debt, which will almost certainly increase the same way it tripled under the beloved Ronald Reagan, not only will that national debt increase, but the climate debt, in a sense, what we have to do to address climate change, will be more and more difficult to pay back or pay down.    Breitbart NewsThe climate change debate went nuclear last year, over a whistleblower s explosive allegation that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association manipulated data to advance a political agenda by hiding the global warming  pause. In an article on the Climate Etc. blog, John Bates, who retired last year as principal scientist of the National Climatic Data Center, accused the lead author of the 2015 NOAA  pausebuster  report of trying to  discredit  the hiatus through  flagrant manipulation of scientific integrity guidelines and scientific publication standards. In addition, Mr. Bates told the Daily [U.K.] Mail that the report s author, former NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information director Thomas Karl, did so by  insisting on decisions and scientific choices that maximized warming and minimized documentation. Gradually, in the months after [the report] came out, the evidence kept mounting that Tom Karl constantly had his  thumb on the scale    in the documentation, scientific choices, and release of datasets   in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming hiatus and rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy,  Mr. Bates said Saturday on Climate Etc.The June 2015 report,  Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus,  which updated the ocean temperature record, was published six months before the U.N. s Paris summit.The accusations sparked a fierce back-and-forth Sunday between so-called climate warmists and skeptics over the validity and implications of Mr. Bates  claim, which he defended on the Climate Etc. blog run by former Georgia Tech climatologist Judith Curry.Zeke Hausfather, Berkeley Earth climate scientist, said in a Sunday  fact-check  on the CarbonBrief blog that the Karl paper s conclusions  have been validated by independent data from satellites, buoys, and Argo floats and many other independent groups. While NOAA s data management procedures may well need improvement, their results have been independently validated and agree with separate global temperature records created by other groups,  Mr. Hausfather said, citing Berkeley Earth and the U.K. s Met Office Hadley Centre.He said the record  strongly suggests that NOAA got it right and that we have been underestimating ocean warming in recent years. Meanwhile, the whistleblowing prompted a  we-told-you-so  moment from Republicans on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee who have long suspected the Obama administration of retroactively fiddling with climate data in order to erase the 1998-2013 pause in global temperature increases. Now that Dr. Bates has confirmed that there were heated disagreements within NOAA about the quality and transparency of the data before publication, we know why NOAA fought transparency and oversight at every turn,  said Chairman Lamar Smith in a Sunday statement.The panel launched an investigation into the NOAA pausebuster report after whistleblowers said the study was  rushed to publication before underlying data issues were resolved to help influence public debate about the so-called Clean Power Plan and upcoming Paris climate conference. Dr. Bates  revelations and NOAA s obstruction certainly lend credence to what I ve expected all along   that the Karl study used flawed data, was rushed to publication in an effort to support the president s climate change agenda and ignored NOAA s own standards for scientific study,  Mr. Smith said.Mr. Bates said he decided to come forward after reading a Washington Post article Dec. 13 that said federal scientists are  frantically copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump. As a climate scientist formerly responsible for NOAA s climate archive, the most critical issue in archival of climate data is actually scientists who are unwilling to formally archive and document their data,  he said on Climate Etc.In his experience, the  most serious example of a climate scientist not archiving or documenting a critical climate dataset was the study of Tom Karl et al. 2015 (hereafter referred to as the Karl study or K15), purporting to show no  hiatus  in global warming in the 2000s. NOAA did not return immediately Sunday a request for comment. The Daily Mail said that Mr. Karl  admitted the data had not been archived when the paper was published  but denied trying to influence the climate summit. Asked why he had not waited, he said:  John Bates is talking about a formal process that takes a long time. He denied he was rushing to get the paper out in time for Paris, saying:  There was no discussion about Paris,  said the Daily Mail article.The American Geophysical Union issued a statement saying it was  very closely monitoring the situation, have considered the possible implications, and will be sharing any new information or response by AGU with you here. 