On Monday, we covered a series of requests (culminating in a subpoena) from Texas Congressman Lamar Smith (R). He sent the requests to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), demanding data and communications relating to a recent update of NOAA’s global surface temperature dataset. NOAA provided Rep. Smith with all the data, methods, and explanation he requested but has refused to hand over the communications of its scientists, which it regards as protected. That’s where the subpoena came in.

We noted that although the demand for internal communications obviously implies suspicion of skullduggery, Rep. Smith had stopped short of actually accusing NOAA of anything like that. That has changed with a statement Rep. Smith provided Nature for its news coverage of the subpoena.

The full statement, which Rep. Smith’s office provided to Ars, reads as follows:

It was inconvenient for this administration that climate data has clearly showed no warming for the past two decades. The American people have every right to be suspicious when NOAA alters data to get the politically correct results they want and then refuses to reveal how those decisions were made. NOAA needs to come clean about why they altered the data to get the results they needed to advance this administration’s extreme climate change agenda. The agency has yet to identify any legal basis for withholding these documents. The Committee intends to use all tools at its disposal to undertake its Constitutionally-mandated oversight responsibilities.

No ambiguity there—Smith is clearly suggesting that NOAA is manipulating its results to further an external agenda. Even though his office has been provided with the raw and corrected data, as well as the details of the methods and a personal accounting of the rationale behind them, he is still accusing the scientists who published the paper in Science of fudging their results. The evidence seems to consist of the fact that he did not like those results.

The claim of “no warming for the past two decades” is simply false. But more importantly, NOAA’s numbers don’t differ in any meaningful way from NASA’s or from any of the other independent surface temperature datasets. But Rep. Smith, who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, thinks that digging through the e-mails of NOAA’s scientists will somehow show that they were pawns of the Obama administration.