Lamar Smith's Venal, Paranoid Bullshit Circus Rolls On; Conspiracy Theories, Science Funding Cuts

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As chairman of the House science committee, Smith has taken a hatchet to funding for earth science. Sometimes he and his committee have concealed their real intentions behind an ostensible concern over the "intellectual merit" of government science grants. But their real goal always has been to undermine the objective evaluation of grant applications via government agency peer reviews and substitute political judgments from Capitol Hill.

When that failed, in part due to resistance from the National Science Foundation, Smith resorted simply to cutting agencies' earth science budgets. As we reported in May, committee Republicans were so sneaky about this that they failed to clue in their Democratic colleagues to what they were planning, then described the results deceitfully.

The latest Science article appears really to have put Smith in a dither. He has accused NOAA's scientists of manipulating their data to serve what he calls President Obama's "extreme climate change agenda." In a Thanksgiving Day op-ed in the conservative Washington Times, he called NOAA's work "not good science, [but] science fiction." Meanwhile, he has subpoenaed data and email correspondence from NOAA and its scientists, supposedly to prove that they tailored their findings to reach a predetermined conclusion. NOAA Administrator Kathryn D. Sullivan, a former astronaut, has turned away his more intrusive demands. As she observed in a Nov. 20 letter, NOAA provided the committee with its raw data and has provided committee staff with extensive briefings, including one by Karl; the offer of a second briefing by Karl was rejected by committee Republicans.

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In recent weeks, Smith has expanded his accusations of a conspiracy to manipulate the data. He has claimed that an unidentified "whistle-blower" has confirmed that NOAA "rushed" the Science article into print to meet an administration deadline. As the science committee's ranking Democrat, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), told Smith in a Nov. 19 letter, however, the accusation is absurd. The Karl paper was submitted to Science in December 2014 and was based on data that originally had been published in 2013. Science says the review process for the paper was more intensive and took nearly two months longer than usual, in part because Science knew the results would provoke a political reaction.

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http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-attack-on-climate-change-scientists-20151204-column.html