The data quality, or information quality, act required OMB and federal agencies to establish guidelines for the data that they data they disseminate in order to maximize quality, utility, objectivity and integrity of information. The goal was to limit the practice of "regulation by publication," or using the governmental impramatur to, e.g., scare Alar off the shelves, or provide trial lawyers fodder for the rash of pending "global warming" lawsuits to require U.S. industry to pay for Third World weather.

Although every single request for correction has been rejected, as has every appeal, even the potential threat of information quality guidelines is apparently just too much for global warming alarmists. See the following e-mail received from Hill staff in the know. It looks like someone -- whom the author speculates to be Senator McCain -- has sneakily inserted an exemption for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to make it the only executive agency excluded (de jure) from informtaion quality requirements.

"We have just learned of a troubling rider included in the CJSJ appropriations bill marked up by the Senate Appropriations Committee on September 19. The rider would exempt NOAA--and climate research--from the sound science requirements of the data quality act.

The data quality act has revolutionized the role of science in policy making by ensuring and maximizing the quality, objectivity, utility and integrity of scientific information federal agencies use. By exempting NOAA, the lead federal agency conducting research into the existence and effects of climate change, this rider prevents an honest evaluation of the science of climate change from occurring and ensures that future policy decisions are based not on sound science but rather on junk science.

If approved, NOAA would be the ONLY executive branch agency exempt from data quality requirments.

Obviously, this issue is tremendously important. CJSJ is not expected to come to the Senate floor in the near future, so we will have to monitor this issue in the context of the CR and, potentially, an Omni.

The rider is on page 52 of the .pdf version of the CJSJ approps bill as marked up 9-15-2004. It is included in the NOAA Operation, Research, Facilities and Systems Acquisitions section of the bill.

Provided further, That section 515 of Public Law 106-554 and any regulations and guidelines promulgated under such authority shall not apply on or after the date of enactment to research and data collection, or information analysis conducted by or for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration."

Doesn't the desire to liberate climate science from the horrors of sound science requirements say all one needs to know about its proponents' level of confidence in its utility?