Former NOAA researcher comments on whistleblower allegations

He says the study wasn’t rushed. Journal Science confirms peer-review wasn’t either.

Lamar Smith has been talking up NOAA research a lot. Credit: Bill Clark for Getty Images

House Science Committee Chair Rep. Lamar Smith’s (R-Texas) latest allegation against NOAA climate scientists was that the organization’s recent research study was “rushed.”

That study has repeatedly drawn the ire of Rep. Smith because it concluded that slower surface temperature warming between 1998 and 2014 was mostly an artifact of error in the dataset. The journal Science published it in June, but Rep. Smith found the results suspicious because new EPA emissions regulations were finalized in August. However, the paper had entered the peer-review process in December 2014, and the updated sea and land surface temperature data that were used had already been published in peer-reviewed journals.

In a Washington Post story this morning, a spokesperson for Science confirmed there was nothing rushed about the paper’s publication. It comes as no surprise, seeing as NOAA has no say whatsoever in operations at Science. In fact, the spokesperson noted that the paper took about 50 percent longer than average to reach publication, and it went out to more than the usual three reviewers.

The Washington Post also talked to an author of the study who retired from NOAA in July about the “rushed” accusations. Thomas Peterson, who is now at the World Meteorological Organization, explained that there had been some tension between researchers and computer engineers behind the code that worked through weather stations on land for abnormalities. The engineers wanted to keep testing their code, and the researchers chafed at the wait. “We’re talking about a time lag of years between the science and when they thought the software testing would be ready because of this question of whether one piece of software might develop a glitch,” Peterson told the paper. The submission of that dataset for peer review in early 2013 was apparently delayed six months for that software testing.

If this is the “rush” that Rep. Smith is referring to, it relates to the land surface temperature dataset, which was simply expanded to include more stations. That change had very little to do with the increase in the warming trend since 1998. The reported warming was almost entirely due to the updated sea surface temperature data.

On Thursday, the leading Democrat on the House Science Committee, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas, sent a second letter excoriating Rep. Smith’s investigation. Describing the accusations that this study was rushed, she writes, “This mild accusation would hardly seem to warrant the hyper-aggressive oversight and rhetoric you have leveled at NOAA.”

Pulling no punches regarding Rep. Smith’s public accusations of politicallymotivated data manipulation, Rep. Johnson continued. “These might be the most outrageous statements ever made by a Chair of the Committee on Science,” she said. “The Constitution doesn’t provide you with a blank check to harass research scientists with whose results you disagree. The Constitution doesn’t imbue you with the power to sanction a separate and equal branch of government simply because they won’t entertain your baseless conspiracy theories.”