Here’s another interesting take on this still unfolding story:
On Science, Politics and Climate Change U.S. Representative Lamar Representative Lamar Smith's strutting his science cred. Bill Chameides | Scientific American | May 22, 2013 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=on-science-politics-and-climate-cha&WT;.mc_id=SA_DD_20130523 That impression of reasonableness was soon undercut when I learned that Smith is leading the charge in new legislation that would mandate a new layer of political review at the National Science Foundation (NSF) before granting funding for research projects. This is a bad and radical idea for any number of reasons, including its violation of a tried-and-true conservative maxim: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The U.S. R&D program is the envy of the world. The United States receives more patents than any other country, and families from all over the globe spend huge sums of money to send their sons and daughters to American universities to study with our researchers and work in our labs. Much of that effort is grounded in the funding of grants by the NSF. Smith's legislation would undermine all that. Another reason you don't want to have politicians mucking around in the nuts and bolts of science is that they often have a shaky grasp of the science at best. A case in point, Rep. Smith's understanding of the state of climate science. Lamar Smith's Take on Climate Science . . .