A top House lawmakers confrontation with government researchers over a groundbreaking climate change study is provoking a national backlash from scientists, who say his campaign represents the most serious threat Congress has posed to scientific freedom.
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, has subpoenaed scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and demanded that they turn over internal e-mails related to their research. Their findings contradicted earlier work showing that global warming had paused, and Smith, a climate change skeptic, has accused them of altering global temperature data and rushing to publish their research in the June issue of the journal Science.
So far, NOAA officials have resisted Smiths demands, and the showdown has escalated.
The lawmaker has threatened to subpoena Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, while scientists have rallied in solidarity with the researchers.
On Tuesday, seven scientific organizations representing hundreds of thousands of scientists sent an unsparing letter to Smith, warning that his efforts are establishing a practice of inquests that will have a chilling effect.
The repercussions of the committees actions could go well beyond climate science, setting a precedent to question other topics such as genetically modified organisms and vaccines that have controversial regulatory and policy implications, the letter said.
At the center of the feud is a report that appeared in the June 4 online edition of Science, a peer-reviewed journal. The NOAA scientists cited improved, more accurate measurements of global temperatures on land and sea to refute the notion of a warming hiatus, striking at the heart of an argument by climate change skeptics.
Smith has alleged that NOAA researchers used inaccurate data or even manipulated it to promote President Obamas agenda on climate change. Smith shifted tactics last week, alleging that the research was rushed and citing what he says is information provided by agency whistleblowers showing that some employees at the agency were concerned that it was premature to publish the study.
The researchers may have violated the agencys scientific integrity standard, Smith suggested.
Their agenda comes first, and the facts come second if at all, he said in a speech last week to the Texas Public Policy Foundation in Austin. He denounced the presidents climate agenda as suspect.
The science is clear and overwhelming but not in the way the president says, Smith said. NOAA employees altered historical climate data to get politically correct results.
But a spokeswoman for Science said in an interview that the NOAA scientists research was subject to a longer, more intensive review than is customary.
This paper went through as rigorous a review as it could have received, said Ginger Pinholster, chief of communications for AAAS, which publishes Science. Any suggestion that the review was rushed is baseless and without merit.
She said the report, submitted to the journal in December,went through two rounds of peer review by other scientists in the field before it was accepted in May. The number of outside reviewers was larger than usual, and the time from submission to online publication was about 50 percent longer than the journals average of 109 days, Pinholster said.
During the review, the research was sent back to NOAA for revision and clarification, she said. And because it was based on such an intensive examination of global temperature data, the reviewed was handled by one of the journals senior editors, she said, so it could be more carefully assessed.
As NOAA scientists examined the data, they discovered that warming trends over the past few decades would be substantially larger than what the earlier data set indicated, recalled Peterson, who retired from NOAA as principal scientist in July.
Was there a rush to get [the research] out? No, he said. Did we want to get this out to advance the science? Of course.