As part of his ongoing fight with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX) sent a February 22 letter that demanded documents related to the agency's analysis of global temperature data. NOAA handed over 301 pages of e-mails between NOAA officials (but not scientists) pertaining to a study published last year in the journal Science. There apparently wasn’t anything juicy in those e-mails, however, because Rep. Smith is now asking for a great deal more.

A new letter (initially acquired by the Union of Concerned Scientists) complains that “[i]t seems unlikely that documents and communications would be so scarce,” and Smith directs NOAA to cast a wider net. He requests e-mails and documents not just from officials in the offices that had been targeted by the previous requests but also from “agency employees” across a broad swath of NOAA. The list includes the National Centers for Environmental Information that houses the scientists behind NOAA's global temperature dataset—a group Rep. Smith has accused of manipulating data.

NOAA had apparently searched for e-mails including “hiatus”, “global temperature”, and “climate study”, but Rep. Smith wants that list expanded dramatically. Now, he wants NOAA to hand over anything that contains “Karl” (the name of the lead NOAA scientist on the Science paper), “buoy”, “ship”, “Night Marine Air Temperature”, “temperature”, “climate”, “change”, “Paris”, “U.N.”, “United Nations”, “clean power plan”, “regulations”, “Environmental Protection Agency”, “President”, “Obama”, “White House”, and “Council on Environmental Quality”.

Those (very broad) terms reflect the fact that Rep. Smith hopes to find that climate data was manipulated due to a directive from the Obama Administration. (It should be noted that NOAA’s dataset looks the same as everyone else’s, and Smith already has access to the data and details on how it was analyzed.)

Rep. Smith also cites a letter to sent him by “325 scientists, engineers, economists, and other scholars raising serious inquiries about the adherence of NOAA to [Office of Management and Budget] guidelines established under the Data Quality Act.” That letter was circulated around climate “skeptic” circles for signatures by retired physicist and George C. Marshall Institute chairman William Happer. Rep. Smith’s has yet to acknowledge the protest letters sent by a number of major scientific organizations, however.

Further Reading More organizations speak out against Congressman’s NOAA investigation

Nevertheless, Rep. Smith has followed the letter’s cue to demand “all documents and communications referring or relating to the processes and methodologies that NOAA implements to adhere to the Data Quality Act,” both generally and relating to the Science paper. The letter even demands “the peer review record” of that paper.

The letter gives NOAA until February 29 to deliver.