Bishop Hill The song remains the same
Oct 8, 2013 
The American Tradition Institute, which has been at the forefront of efforts to get public servants in the USA to behave like servants of the public has changed its name to the Energy and Environment Legal Institute.
But its work continues along very much the same lines as before, with its struggle to expose the emails of public servant Jonathan Overpeck to the gaze of the people who pay his salary currently to the fore.
A Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group has sued the University of Arizona demanding the release of a cache of documents — including two professors’ emails — related to climate change and global warming.
The Energy and Environment Legal Institute, which until recently was known as the American Tradition Institute, first requested the documents in December 2011. It sued in Pima County Superior Court in September, after the university released some of the documents, but withheld most on what the institute considers questionable grounds.
There is also ongoing legal work related to the University of Virginia's refusal to release Michael Mann's emails.
Reader Comments (9)
Full marks to Christopher C. Horner, for persisting and not being fobbed off by the system.
I am sure that I speak for others when I say, we salute you.
We could do with a similar institute here in the UK first to take The MET Office to court to prove that they are an Advocacy institution rather than scientific one and also to promote judicial reviews of the climate advice provided to government by the Chief Government Scientific Adviser What about the propriety of individuals like Lord Deben and their financial interests in the groups benefiting from the decisions they are involved in promoting or taking? Ultimately, if you cannot debate with them on rational grounds ultimately the law courts are the last bastion for reason.
Isn't it amazing how many people are still caught up in the totally weird ideas that "fossil fuel interests" don't fund green groups and that trying to call public servants (including publicly funded scientists) to account is somehow "anti-science"?
Sad, really.
Glad to see the appeal allowed.
Those that hold the views you refer to, Mike, are intellectually dead in bed.
Anyone find it funny how such 'settled science' finds the need to use so many smokescreens in practice ?
The refusal to release tells us as much if not more about the type of people we're dealing with than the actual release does. IMO
Those emails, if they ever do see the light of day, will doubtless reveal the same picture of scientific mediocrity and careerist squalor as was exposed by the climategate emals.
Let's hope that finally something sticks to these slippery eels.
Former head of Oxford ECI Diane Liverman, a Geography Professor, in 2009 set up a new climate institute at Arizona University with Overpeck, although she is still a visiting Oxford professor, http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/people/livermandiana.php. Very interesting bio.
The Grand Old Man of Global Warming, Sir Crispin Tickell is currently on the advisory board of the Oxford ECI and was Warden of Green College, Oxford between 1990 and 1997, where he appointed George Monbiot and Norman Myers as Visiting Fellows. He is a Director of the Global Institute for Sustainability at Arizona University, where the aforementioned Diane Liverman co-directs the Institute of the Environment with Jonathan Overpeck. John Gummer was previously on the ECI advisory board.
Wheels within wheels within wheels and loads of consensus between institutes across the world....