Republicans and Democrats sparred Wednesday over the influence of politics in shaping the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s research, which the GOP argues was manipulated to pump up the president’s climate change agenda.
“Instead of hyping a climate change agenda, NOAA should focus its efforts on producing sound science and improving methods of data collection,” said House science committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas.
Smith led the GOP charge at a hearing Wednesday on the agency’s fiscal 2017 budget, saying the agency must re-prioritize its efforts away from climate change to focus on basic weather research that is free of a political agenda.
The committee started an investigation into the atmospheric agency’s climate reporting last year and is still waiting to hear back from the subpoena it issued its administrator.
“It is NOAA’s job to monitor the climate and disseminate data to the public,” Smith said. “But under this administration this usually takes the form of monthly news releases that fail to include all relevant data sources.”
Smith said the agency’s determination that 2014 and 2015 were the hottest years on record is highly contested, as is a study that it released last year that showed a hiatus in global warming had not taken place although other scientific studies disagree.
“The truth is neither 2014 nor 2015 were the hottest year on record,” Smith said. “Satellite data that NOAA had access to clearly refute [the agency’s] claims.” He said the agency routinely ignores satellite data that scientists say is the most “objective” when seeking to evaluate the climate.
The committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas, called the GOP investigation “unfounded.”
“It is clear to me that this investigation is unfounded and it is being driven by ideology and other agendas,” Johnson said. “The majority has asserted without offering credible evidence that NOAA and the climate science community at large are part of some grand conspiracy to falsify data in support of the significant role humans play in climate change.”
NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan said her agency’s reporting is considered the “gold standard” among many scientific and research organizations. She said the agency takes great pains to maintain its scientific integrity and includes clear protections to ensure “no political interference” takes place.
She told Smith that her staff was continuing to work with the science committee to meet its needs under the terms of the subpoena it had issued.
Smith pressed her on the study from last year on the global warming hiatus, which is the focus of the subpoena. He said the agency stifled internal review of the study’s findings to rush out its findings. “The goal was clear from the start, remove a weakness in the administration’s climate change agenda,” he said.
Smith said the report was rushed to help justify the president’s landmark climate change regulations for power plants, which is the basis of the president’s commitment to a global climate change deal reached in December.
“I stand by the integrity and quality of the … study,” Sullivan said, in which the agency did a “valid job.”
