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Audio for this story from Morning Edition will be available at approximately 9:00 a.m. ET. U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, and Kathryn Sullivan, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have been tangling for months over the legitimacy of a climate study NOAA scientists published in Science. Drew Angerer/AP; Mark Wilson/Getty Images hide caption About 600 scientists and engineers, including former employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have signed on to letters urging the head of that agency, Kathryn Sullivan, to push back against political interference in science. For months, Sullivan has been tangling with U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas and chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, as he investigates a climate change study done by NOAA scientists. That study, published earlier this year in the journal Science, cast doubt on the what some have called a global warming hiatus — the idea that global warming has slowed in the last two decades. Smith says his actions are a legitimate part of his oversight duties. But scientists call it harassment. June 4: The journal Science publishes a report by NOAA scientists that suggests a much-ballyhooed "pause" in global warming does not actually exist. June 16: NOAA scientist who worked on the study briefs staffers of the House Science Committee. July 14: The committee's chairman, Lamar Smith, R-Texas, writes to NOAA, demanding data, methods, and emails related to the study. Sept. 10 and 25: Smith sends additional letters to NOAA asking for more information. Oct. 13: Smith issues subpoena to NOAA administrator, requesting wide range of documents and communications. Oct. 19: Two NOAA scientists involved in the research brief committee staffers in Washington, D.C., on the study. Nov. 18: Smith writes to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, who oversees NOAA, to demand compliance with the subpoena. He alleges that whistleblowers have told him the "study was rushed to publication, despite concerns and objections of a number of NOAA scientists." Nov. 20: NOAA director Kathryn Sullivan writes to Smith that, "I have not and will not allow anyone to manipulate the science or coerce the scientists who work for me." Nov. 24: Leading scientific societies write a letter to Smith expressing their "grave concern" that his congressional inquiry amounts to political interference in the scientific process. Dec. 1: Smith writes again to Pritzker, this time prioritizing the emails from NOAA's non-scientist staff in his request for documents. Dec. 7: Roughly 600 scientists send a letter to Sullivan, imploring the NOAA director to "stand firm" in resisting what they see as Smith's continuing efforts to interfere with the scientific research process. In a separate letter, scientists who formerly worked at NOAA also urge Sullivan to "continue to resist any unwarranted congressional investigations that would contribute to stifling the scientific process and even intimidate NOAA scientists and their collaborators." "Please continue to resist this dangerous abuse of congressional oversight power," the scientists and engineers write to Sullivan in a letter they sent to her Monday. "We urge you to continue to stand firm against these bullying tactics in order to protect NOAA scientists' ability to pursue research and publish data and results regardless of how contentious the issue may be." In a separate letter, also dated Dec. 7, former NOAA scientists urge Sullivan "to continue to resist any unwarranted congressional investigations that would contribute to stifling the scientific process and even intimidate NOAA scientists and their collaborators." Jim Buizer, a climate change researcher now at the University of Arizona, used to work at NOAA and says he signed on to this letter after Smith issued a subpoena for, among other things, scientists' emails. "It hits us on a very personal level, but also on a professional one," Buizer says. "It distracts people from the hard work that they're doing. And it's a distraction that doesn't serve the American people very well." In the past, he says, people have gotten their hands on emails from climate scientists and taken them out of context to cast doubt on the scientists' research. "We don't have anything to hide; it's just that people don't understand how we work," says Buizer. These letters are just the latest in a fierce battle of correspondence that's been waged since the climate change study first appeared in June and came to Smith's attention. "I have a couple of concerns about this study," the congressman tells NPR. "One, the timing is very suspicious, right before the climate meeting in Paris.Two, we have whistleblowers who have told us it was rushed, just to get it out for the Paris meeting, and some scientists felt like it had not been sufficiently vetted." Smith says his biggest concern was that the study did not include satellite data, which he calls the gold standard. "It didn't seem to me to be a completely honest study," he says. Asked if the normal peer review process done at a major journal like Science wouldn't have flagged any missing information or cherry picking of data, Smith says, "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." "And, you know," the congressman adds, "Science magazine may have its own bias. I don't know, maybe they wanted to rush it out before the Paris summit as well." Jesse Smith, a senior editor at Science, tells NPR that the manuscript was submitted in December of 2014, and the review process was thorough and not rushed at all. "The process actually took longer than it usually does," the Science editor says, "because we subjected the paper to even more scrutiny than we subject most papers to." What's more, the editor adds, satellite data is irrelevant to this study, which concerns sea surface temperatures from ships and buoys. "The paper wasn't about satellite measurements of tropospheric temperatures," he notes. "It was about sea surface temperature measurements, which are just one part of a larger picture." "The scientific process is modern civilization's best means for arriving at reliable truth," says Rush Holt, the executive publisher of Science and head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "And that process should be allowed to work without political meddling," he says. The AAAS is one of eight major scientific associations that recently wrote to the congressman to express concern about the "chilling effect" this inquest could have on science.
