Enlarge / A research vessel drops off a float that will make measurements as it drifts. (credit: Olivier Dugornay/IFREMER)

When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) updated its global temperature dataset to include revisions to the underlying databases, US House Science Committee Chair Lamar Smith (R-TX) somehow knew that the scientists had done it wrong. In fact, he accused them of having “altered temperature data to get politically correct results.”

How could he know that? Well, Rep. Smith rejects the conclusions of climate science—like the fact that the Earth’s climate is warming. Despite the slight up and down wiggles of the estimated annual temperatures, the warming of the last couple decades increased ever so slightly in NOAA’s new analysis. To Smith, the result was a red flag. Suddenly he wanted to see the researchers’ e-mails and echoed the accusations of contrarian blogs about scientists’ supposedly nefarious adjustments to sea surface temperature measurements.

The update to NOAA’s dataset was really pretty subtle. (credit: Karl et al./Science)

Rather than invoking scientific conspiracies, issues like this should be settled by analyzing the data. A new study, led by University of California Berkeley’s Zeke Hausfather, does just that—and Rep. Smith won’t like these results, either.