November 5, 2015 — It’s getting hot in here. A dispute between the chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) over a climate change paper published this summer is escalating. The latest salvos include a second letter from Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX) to NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan seeking internal communications and documents authored by NOAA employees and a letter from the American Meteorological Society condemning Smith’s demands and warning about its implications for all federally funded research.

The quarrel began with a paper by NOAA scientists published 5 June in Science that revised historical atmosphere and ocean temperature data records found to have been poorly calibrated. In 2013 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had noted that the temperature data seemed to suggest that global warming had slowed down beginning around 1998. But the Science paper showed that apparent slowdown in global warming vanished when the data were corrected to account for various sources of bias.

That paper immediately caught Smith’s attention, triggering multiple committee requests for data and methodologies related to the study. NOAA told the committee that the findings were already publicly available and met twice with committee staff to brief them on the results.

But that response didn’t satisfy Smith. On 13 October, he subpoenaed all of NOAA’s internal emails related to the paper, asking for the information by 27 October. In response, the committee’s Democrats wrote to Smith on 23 October, noting that the subpoena “appears to be furthering a fishing expedition” and saying that it oversteps the committee’s bounds, as the paper is a research study and not a policy decision. House Republican leadership this year had given Smith the authority to issue subpoenas without the consent of the minority party.

Read the full story at Science Insider