The House Science Committee Chair is harassing climate scientists

Lamar Smith has targeted government climate change researchers with a subpoena that demands all their notes and correspondence relating to a recent study

If you don't like a particular scientific study, attack the scientists who produced it. It's a tried and true method of manufacturing controversy around inconvenient scientific analysis. And now, Lamar Smith, Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, is using the sledgehammer of a congressional subpoena to bully National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists for their research on climate change.

At issue is a paper published in Science earlier this year by NOAA scientists contradicting claims that the rate of global warming had recently slowed. The NOAA study is based on routine updates NOAA made to its surface temperature dataset, one of the many datasets that experts use to measure how fast the climate is changing. Scientists in many fields update datasets all the time to correct for differences in measurement techniques and to add new information. Multiple subsequent scientific papers derived from other data corroborate the NOAA scientists' conclusions.