Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the chairman of the House Science Committee, on Friday made another attempt to force the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to hand over internal documents about a study on climate change.
Smith wrote a letter to Commerce Secretary Pritzker, calling on her to direct the NOAA to comply with Smith’s subpoenas, Ars Technica reported.
The House Republican has been pressing the NOAA for months for more information on a June study in an attempt to show that researchers altered data to prove that global warming has slowed over the past few years. The study released by the the NOAA in June contradicted some previous studies that found that global warming had slowed.
In July, Smith asked the NOAA for more information. The agency provided additional data and two in-person explanations of the study to Congress, but refused to hand over internal communications between the researchers.
“Because the confidentiality of these communications among scientists is essential to frank discourse among scientists, those documents were not provided to the Committee,” the agency said in a statement to Nature. “It is a long-standing practice in the scientific community to protect the confidentiality of deliberative scientific discussions.”
This prompted Smith to accuse the NOAA of altering “the data to get the results they needed to advance this administration’s extreme climate change agenda,” which the NOAA quickly denied.
Smith then issued a subpoena to the NOAA in October, demanding that the agency turn over internal communications, and asking four NOAA employees to sit with the Science Committee for interviews.
In his letter to the Commerce Department on Friday, Smith complained that the NOAA has not complied with the subpoena. He wrote that the “NOAA has devoted significant resources and time to obstruct and delay the Committee’s efforts.”
Smith also indirectly responded to the Science Committee’s ranking member, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), who wrote in an October letter that internal documents related to a scientific study is “not an area of delegated legislative authority.”
“Contrary to opinion by some regarding the Committee’s current requests of NOAA, Congressional oversight need not, indeed should not, begin only when evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, mismanagement, or other wronging is unveiled,” Smith wrote on Friday.
The congressman also criticized the agency for using its Twitter account and a press release to promote the study:
For example, the study conducted by Dr. Karl and his NOAA colleagues was not quietly published in a scientific journal so that other scientists could replicate or refute its findings through further investigation. Instead, NOAA heralded the study’s publication, stating in a widely-circulated press release with the title “Science publishes new NOAA analysis: Data show no recent slowdown in global warming,” that “[t]he study refutes the notion that there has been a slowdown or “hiatus” in the rate of global warming in recent years.” NOAA also used Twitter to spread the news about the Karl study, tweeting “NOAA study refutes notion of ‘hiatus’ in rate of #globalwarming in recent yrs.” This type of public relations effort seems better suited to an advertising campaign than a federal agency’s sober report on the findings of a publicly-funded study.
