Over the past couple months, there's been an ongoing battle between Congressman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), chair of the House Science Committee, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). After a June study published in Science concluded there was no evidence that global warming had slowed in recent years, Rep. Smith accused NOAA climate scientists of manipulating surface temperature data for political reasons.

Rep. Smith has subpoenaed the internal communications of those scientists despite being provided all the data, methods, and rationale behind the work. NOAA replied it does not intend to release e-mails between scientists.

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

On December 1, Rep. Smith changed tack in a letter reiterating his demands. The letter complained that NOAA’s objections had focused on his requests for scientists’ communications, when he was also requesting communications between other NOAA staff. So he modified his terms—he'd start with e-mails from elsewhere in NOAA. “In order to move the Committee’s work forward and to allow for further discussions on issues related to the subpoenaed communications about which the agency and the Committee disagree, the Committee is willing to accommodate NOAA and prioritize communications sent and received by non-scientific personnel,” the letter read. “However, this prioritization does not alleviate NOAA’s obligation to respond fully to the Committee’s subpoena.”

On Tuesday, NOAA provided communications among staff discussing things like NOAA’s press release about the study. A statement provided to Ars by NOAA read, in part, “The documents NOAA delivered to the Committee contain e-mails among NOAA communications and front office staff discussing the routine mechanics of a communications plan for the paper. The documents include discussions that show NOAA front office staff was aware that the study was particularly noteworthy and would likely be the focus of scrutiny and debate. At the same time, there is nothing in these materials that would support the notion that substance or timing of the paper was politically motivated.”

In the meantime, Rep. Smith has continued to publicly accuse NOAA scientists of manipulating temperature data. After an opinion piece by Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann ran in The New York Times, Rep. Smith penned a letter to the editor. “Atmospheric satellite data, considered by many to be the most objective, has clearly showed no warming for the past two decades,” he wrote. “But NOAA inexplicably omitted satellite data to reach the conclusions it wanted.”

Here in reality, these satellite measurements are generally considered to be more uncertain than surface records, if anything. They determine temperatures at various levels in the atmosphere by analyzing microwave radiation emitted by oxygen. And as they only measure temperatures far above the Earth’s surface, it’s unclear why Rep. Smith contends they should be used to calculate global surface temperatures.

Rep. Smith also wrote, “The American people have a right to know the real motivations behind this study, which are clearly suspect.” Similarly, he told NPR, “It didn't seem to me to be a completely honest study.” Other than contending that the study was “rushed,” however, Rep. Smith has not offered any explanation of problems with the study.

When asked how the study survived peer review to be published in the journal Science if there were obvious problems, Rep. Smith told NPR, “I don’t think that Science magazine had access to a whistleblower like we did, saying it had been rushed and had not been sufficiently peer-reviewed.”

Of course, it was Science that performed the peer review, and the journal has confirmed that the paper went out to more than the customary three peer reviewers and took longer than average to get published. (Additionally, the updated datasets NOAA used had already been peer-reviewed and published separately.) Yet Rep. Smith told NPR, “Science magazine may have its own bias. I don’t know, maybe they wanted to rush it out before the Paris summit as well.”