What is the House Science Committe Doing?

And more importantly, what should it be doing?

I've read several news stories in the past month about the House Science Committee and its ability to subpoena scientists who receive government funding ( see here, here or here for examples). The ones I read have been saying that Lamar Smith, the republican representative who is chairman of the committee, has been using this power to harrass scientists whose conclusions support the theory that man has changed the climate, and it is warming.

Lamar Smith, who, as you can tell from his choice of clothing, is not a scientist.

The biggest story has centered around this paper, published in Science Magazine, in which NOAA attempted to fix errors in their physical measurements of temperature in the past and update their historical datasets for the public. In the course of analyzing the new data sets, it also appears that the recent "hiatus" in global warming may be an artifact of incorrect data. Lamar Smith has subpoenad a substantial number of scientists to get to the bottom of this. He accuses NOAA of rushing this paper to publication so it could be ready for the climate talks going on now in Paris. His biggest criticism is that it doesn't take satellite data into consideration, and had they done so, their conclusion regarding the hiatus would be different. When I read that, I thought "that seems like a fair criticism. I know a little bit about satellite data, and I know that it is a useful tool for measuring climate trends. Why wouldn't they include it?"

So I took a look at the paper, and it's pretty interesting stuff to read about - it turns out that lots of sea-surface temperature measurements came from boats all the way back to WWII. The engines had water intake thermometers, and the ships kept logs of their readings. Some ships also lowered buckets into the water, and measured the temperature of that water. Other readings come from bouys. Not surprisingly, it turns out that each of these methods can create a slightly different temperature read-out, which NOAA had not taken into consideration. In the disputed paper, they attempt to correct for those slight discrepencies. The new, standardized dataset gets applied to papers that looked for trends in the data over decades. NOAA's paper links to updated papers. These papers presumably showed a hiatus when using the old data; using the updated data, the hiatus is less prominent. That's all the NOAA paper says. The conclusion that the hiatus isn't a thing doesn't seem to have anything to do with this study - that comes from other papers that already been accepted!


In other words, NOAA didn't include satellite data because the paper had nothing to do with satellite data. Imagine if you had been using two different scales for the past ten years to weigh yourself, and those scales disagreed with each other by a five or ten pounds. Correcting all your old measurements might make your own records more accurate. If you bragged about this to your friend, who then asked you "well, why didn't you also check your old height measurements,"you would probably want to whack your friend on the head with a yardstick; you weren't talking about height to begin with! (To be fair, for this metaphor to be more accurate, you would have had to make your weight records available to the public for a while. Lots of doctors would then get together and look at your records and conduct an astonish amount of science indicating that your weight looks like it's been rising really, really quickly in the past couple of days, and that it's probably because you started eating thousands of donuts without pooping a week ago. Those doctors would then note that you haven't appeared to have gained any weight over the past few minutes, but once they hear about your new measurements, they recheck their data and say "you might have still been gaining weight." And this is when your friend comes in, starts bothering the doctors, and asking "how come his height doesn't show any change?)

Getting to the bottom of this took me about two hours. Not bad, and I'm glad I questioned this story. But it also made me angry that this is a story at all. This government committee is taking a lot of time in Washington, and my understanding of time in Washington is that it is expensive. As I see it, the government is spending money creating two hour research projects for citizens who want to stay informed of important climate science. The House Science Committee is tasked with making sure that government funding for science is used properly. Oversight is one thing, but that should be secondary. The government's first role should be to clarify the findings of papers that they think are important. If a "Science Committee" finds issues with a scientific paper that discredit it, I want those issues clearly explained. That's important, and I don't disagree with Lamar Smith on that, but adding confusion by making irrelevant objections is not helpful. The best way to make sure that government funding is put to good use is to communicate the findings of important papers to the public, not to distract attention from them.

[Sidenote: I did a little more reading, and found this blog article from 2014, by Carl Mears, the person Senator Ted Cruz cites when he brings up the hiatus and satellite measurements, Carl Mears points to disagreements in the satellite datasets that are even more substantial than those in direct surface temperature measurements. As of 2014, he did not think that the hiatus was entirely an artifact, but that was before this paper.]