Rep. Lamar Smith Continues His Harassment of Scientists

By Phil Plait

The saga of The Man in Congress in Charge of Science but Who Doesn’t Understand It continues.

For those new to this, Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas—chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee—doesn’t think global warming is real. He thinks it’s a huge conspiracy by climate scientists who fudge the data to make it look like the planet is heating up, because Obama.

I wish I were being hyperbolic. But this is literally true.

In Part 1 of our tale, Smith subpoenaed Kathryn Sullivan, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, claiming that scientists in her agency were “altering the data.” Smith got this idea after a paper was published in Science showing that the global warming “pause” so lauded by climate change deniers didn’t, in fact, exist. This research was done by a team of NOAA scientists and, I’ll note, is correct. The “pause” isn’t real.

That didn’t stop Smith. He also demanded the data, methodology, and emails of NOAA scientists be released (despite the first two already being publicly available). We also learned that Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas—who is the senior Democrat on the committee—sent Smith a letter accusing him of harassing and second-guessing scientists, and also pointed out he’s not qualified to assess the data or methods. This, too, is correct.

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http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/11/23/lamar_smith_harassment_of_scientists_continues.html