Lamar Smith sows disorder as climate debate rages.

WASHINGTON – Seated at the front of his House Science Committee hearing room last month, Rep. Lamar Smith leaned back as a panel of climate scientists bickered, accusing each other of everything from climate denial to bullying to miscalculating data collected by satellites.

But when it came to the fundamental issue – that human activity is driving the planet’s climate in a dangerous direction – there was no disagreement. Undaunted, Smith, R-San Antonio, focused his questioning on long-standing and sometimes personal disagreements between the scientists until that fundamental area of agreement was lost on most anyone in the room without a PhD.

After the hearing, even one of Smith’s own witnesses, Roger Pielke Jr., an environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder, expressed disbelief that politicians like Smith were still arguing over the science when the evidence to justify action on climate change is three decades old. “It’s all a bizarro world,” he said.

“They’re fighting back with the tools they have, which is politics, and the scientists are fighting with what they have, knowledge,” Pielke added “And it’s a big mess in the mud.”

With a pronounced climate change skeptic in the White House in President Donald Trump, Smith, the powerful Republican chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, has ramped up his campaign to pick at the foundations of climate science, battling against emissions policies that threaten fossil fuel industries and questioning the government’s relationship with science itself.

For the better part of two years, Smith has staged regular hearings in which he has accused established scientists of manipulating data and bullying those with contrarian points of view. The campaign follows the 2015 climate accord in Paris, where nearly 200 world leaders agreed forecasts had become so dire that countries needed to work together immediately to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

Questioning forecasts

Smith’s decision to take on that global consensus might generate cheers in the oil and gas fields, but in Washington the 69-year-old congressman is drawing heat – not only from Democrats and environmentalists but also universities and researchers. During the hearing last month, Michael Mann, a well-regarded climate scientist from Penn State University, compared the activities of the House Science Committee to that of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, whose decision to promote the theories of the fringe agronomist Trofim Lysenko contributed to chronic food shortages in that country.

But Smith, a bespectacled Yale grad and former journalist at the Christian Science Monitor, avoids grandiose proclamations and sticks to carefully worded critiques that exploit real disagreements within the scientific community. A lawyer by training, Smith says he believes climate change is real and humans play some role but questions the dire forecasts of fast-rising oceans and widespread drought.

In an email, Smith said it’s important that climate research continues and low-carbon technology gets developed but described his role as one of double-checking the scientific record to protect against poor decisions.

“Before any major policy action takes place, the merits of its environmental and economic impact should be scrutinized so that the greatest benefit can be bestowed on the American people,” he said in the email. “Congress has a responsibility to increase the quality of life for the American people.”

In February, for instance, Smith pounced when a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wrote a post on a scientific blog about a colleague rushing the results in a climate change paper to get it published ahead of the Paris conference. The rift was over procedure – the colleague had failed to handle and archive the data according to department protocols – not over the substance of the paper, as the scientist, John Bates, later told the Associated Press.

But it was enough for Smith to order a news release with the headline, “Former NOAA Scientist Confirms Colleagues Manipulated Climate Records.”

As in any scientific field, climate change is rife with opposing points of view and contrarians who push back when they believe their colleagues overshoot the mark. And Smith is adept at finding those disagreements and exploiting them, scientists and other critics say, with the end result of muddying the debate and delaying action.

‘It’s a puzzle to me’

Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson of Dallas, the ranking Democrat on the Science Committee who has come to represent the pro-climate science voice on the panel, says she fears Smith is putting the committee’s reputation as an objective body at risk.

“It’s a puzzle to me. I have a good working relationship with him, but I can’t seem to draw him out on what he has an objection to,” she said. “During the Obama years, I thought it was all political, but it has continued through the end of that administration.”

Smith’s attacks on climate science come as the consensus on the causes and effects of global warming has grown so wide that even large oil companies such as Exxon Mobil are urging action. Within the Republican Party, luminaries including former Secretary of State James Baker and former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson are pressing the White House to support a carbon tax to discourage fuels that produce large amounts of carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas.

But Smith represents a still powerful strain within the Republican Party for which climate change policy is a non-starter, said Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina who lost his primary after favoring policies aimed at slowing climate change. Inglis said he believes Smith has stepped up his campaign because he sees the debate and facts shifting against him.

“People put in that position usually start to dig in,” he said.

Back in Smith’s home district, which covers the bucolic Hill Country region between San Antonio and Austin, such a world view borders on anathema.

There is little in the way of oil and gas wells there, but it is a rural idyll where conservative principles stand tall and many have worked in the oil fields to the west in the Permian Basin and the south in the Eagle Ford, said Ruth Pharis, chair of the Republican Party in Comal County, which lies in Smith’s district. Pharis said so much is still unknown about how climate change will play out that it doesn’t make sense to stop using the plentiful oil and gas that lies beneath states like Texas.

“The people that settled here, they were mostly German, hard-working, grew their own food and didn’t take a dime from anyone. It’s changed with time, but there’s still that strain of people living here,” said Pharis, 83. “Lamar’s a pretty conservative guy, and he pretty much listens to his constituents. I’ve never been disappointed.”

The climate change fight parallels Smith’s broader push to rein in a scientific community that he argues is too quick to jump to conclusions and fails to account for differences of opinion within its ranks.

“The days of trust-me science are over,” he said at a recent conference on climate change hosted by the conservative Heartland Institute. Already, Smith has legislation in various stages of development that would, among other things, change federal conflict of interest statutes to give scientists employed by industrial and energy companies a greater presence on the scientific board that advises the head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

More legislation

Another bill, called the HONEST Act, would require the EPA to rely only on scientific studies for which the underlying data is available to the public and can be reproduced. But the data on many health studies is kept confidential, to protect patients and the companies that share their emissions reports with scientists.

Universities and medical researchers at-large have come out in opposition, arguing it would limit EPA’s access to science and slow needed regulation.

The genesis of the legislation, a staffer with the House Science Committee explained, was a pair of studies commissioned by Harvard University and the American Cancer Society that found people living in cities with dirtier air tended to die earlier – the basis for a number of EPA air pollution regulations.

Judith Curry, one of the climate scientists called by Smith to testify at the climate change hearing, complained she had been forced to resign her tenured position at Georgia Tech after questioning other scientists’ work. Smith’s first question asked her to explain “the biases” within the field, and Curry ran through a laundry list of technical jargon about thermodynamic feedback and ocean oscillations, leaving one to believe she agreed with her inquisitor’s point of view.

Only Curry does not question that climate change is a significant threat to the planet. She simply argues that some scientists “are denying uncertainty in certain areas,” said Kenneth Evans a post-doctoral fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

“That’s her thing, and she basically wants to go figure things out,” he said. “When it came out (at the hearing) it sounded awkward. But this is exactly what the House science committee wanted, internal bickering between scientists that bolstered their argument.”