EDITORIAL: NOAA goes into global hiding

Climate change agitators love to say the science is settled in their favor, that researchers have irrefutably proved industrial carbon emissions are causing global temperatures to rise to such an extent that irreversible environmental damage already is under way. Considering their conviction, you'd think the research and work product of climate alarmists would be an open book.

You'd be wrong.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the country's taxpayer-funded scientific authority on all things sea and air, is behind new research that bolsters the assertion that the planet is warming. A growing body of recent research has identified a warming "pause," or at least a slowdown in temperature increases, over the past 15 years. These data have hurt the arguments of climate change defenders, who insist that urgent, sweeping government action is needed to slow down global warming. Because warming already has slowed without such Draconian action, costly new regulations clearly aren't needed at all.

So Thomas Karl, the director of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, published a paper in the June issue of the peer-reviewed journal Science that's based on what he says are "corrected" data. And, not surprisingly, these revisions show global temperatures on an unrelenting march higher.

But one man's correction is manipulation to another. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, wants to see the work product behind the study — all the internal communications that led to the "corrections." And NOAA has refused to provide them.

"Because the confidentiality of these communications among scientists is essential to frank discourse among scientists, those documents were not provided to the Committee," the agency told Nature. "It is a long-standing practice in the scientific community to protect the confidentiality of deliberative scientific discussions."

In fact, scientists employed by taxpayers enjoy no such privilege. More likely, they're stalling because their "frank discourse" includes interactions that, at a minimum, will highlight bias and political influence.

If we're going to be regulated into recession for a problem that might not even exist, the public certainly has a right to know whether the numbers might be rigged to benefit a hyperpolitical agenda. NOAA's records don't belong to the government. They belong to the public. Let's see what we're paying for.