Why would emails be more important than the data? The data should speak for itself, only a politician is looking for "gotcha" phrases they can print in huge letters for a poster board that they put up while making speeches denying global warming. It's not that these politicians don't understand how science works, they understand how to manipulate people to favor legislation that is actually against their interests.<p>Edit: For those that are suggesting that you need the emails to verify that scientists aren't making up the data, the data itself includes information on its providence. All the information you need to trust the data come from independent verification of the data and from information in the data itself. You don't need emails to verify research, but if you did then there's a problem with how research is published.
"Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) wants thousands of e-mails among scientists and NOAA’s staff of political appointees that he thinks will show that the researchers had something to hide when they refuted claims that global warming had “paused” or slowed over the past decade."<p>Apparently climate change science is not in the published research itself, but can only be found by going through someone's email. What bald-faced douchebaggery.
Good. The only purpose to reviewing <i>internal communications</i> was to find a red herring to use as a lever to undermine the scientific method. Providing details about the research and the methods presented is reasonable for a peer review, but this is someone with a political axe to grind.
I will avoid the cliche about how sites like HN have one opinion.<p>But I do find myself wondering how many people here frothing at the mouth have, in other contexts, sung the praise of heavy government funding of science research. Or how many sing praises of government oversight.<p>This is it. This is government funding in science research, and government oversight. The oversight committee has the right to perform oversight. In any healthy country, eventually, politicians you don't like will be in charge of the oversight levers, as naturally as day follows night. (Unless you live under eternal single-party control, in which case you've got bigger problems than science oversight committees.)<p>There's no world where the government funds science research but just ships out the dollars with no regard for what happens afterwards.
Lamar Smith is going after others too.<p>"Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX), the chairman of the science panel of the House of Representatives, announced plans to investigate a nonprofit research group led by climate scientist Jagadish Shukla of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. <i>He is the lead signer of a letter to White House officials that urges the use of an antiracketeering law to crack down on energy firms that have funded efforts to raise doubts about climate science.</i>"<p><a href="http://news.sciencemag.org/policy/2015/10/turnabout-house-republicans-say-they-ll-investigate-climate-scientist-requesting" rel="nofollow">http://news.sciencemag.org/policy/2015/10/turnabout-house-re...</a>
I think the scientists should release all of their personal emails if these politicians are willing to submit themselves to the same level of transparency.
These Republicans are shameful. The sad part is that they will all be dead when their grandkids are cursing their names for assisting in the destruction of the environment.
That subpoena is fairly damning evidence that these politicians don't understand how science works. Instead of scrutinizing the published data they have to dig into communications - where all sorts of theories might be floated and dismissed - so they can find something to take out of context.
An important detail of the story that the headline doesn't highlight is that these scientists are employees of the government, and the communications being subpoenaed are work emails. It's hard to see from where NOAA gets the authority to turn Congress down on this.
Politics and science really have no place together. Politics is about pushing the most favorable agenda, and science is about the pursuit of truth. Politicians and liars have always had close association. Politics and science are thus inherently at odds.<p>That said, I have seen, on more than one occasion, scientists become untruthful for the sake of grants and political agendas (and this is not necessarily referring to global warming). The FDA is one example where money often trumps science. <a href="http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/10/common-decongestant-may-be-worthless-study-finds/" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/10/common-decongestant-m...</a>
> “We are just trying to fully understand the full context of the decision-making process,” a Republican committee aide said of the demand for correspondence.<p>I look forward to the day when all email between members of Congress are public by default, to fully understand the representation process that they conduct on our behalf.
It's perfectly okay to say all communication on a particular project of public interest should be open. Fine, set up a public mailing list and tell people to use that instead of private email.<p>It's a lot less okay to lead people to believe their communications are private and then demand to read their email after the fact. What if Alice, in what she believed to be a private email to Bob, truthfully criticised Carol for being a vindictive jerk, and in the meantime Carol has climbed the political ladder and now has the power to sabotage Alice's career?<p>If Congress or whoever wanted that sort of oversight, they should have said so upfront, not to try to apply it retroactively.
On one hand, the aims of the politicos here are bald-facedly wrong.<p>On the other hand, good luck with that whole "refusing a subpoena" thing - courts don't generally look upon that with favor, and besides, NOAA is a public institution, so the emails are public record, regardless of the aims of the people seeking them.<p>Being in a contentious field is not free license to ignore the law, and it tends to make people think you're hiding something when you do this.