UEA correspondence with Outside

UEA have released some of their correspondence with the Outside Organisation. The disclosures can be seen here.

Although there are quite a large number of documents released, it appears that this is mostly just the "boilerplate", to use Mann's expression. The university seem to be claiming exemptions under s41 breach of confidence and s43 commercial interests. Ho hum.

What has been disclosed is of minor interest - meetings with Neil Wallis to rehearse Phil Jones for his performance before the SciTech Committee, hiring a camera crew to film a clip of Edward Acton outside Portcullis House afterwards. I remember the latter from the news reports on the day. It is interesting to see that the MSM were happy to take footage from UEA. It doesn't make them look very good in my opinion.

Las Investigaciones del Climategate

My GWPF report, The Climategate Inquiries, is now available in Spanish.

I am hugely indebted to my translator, Andres Valencia, who has been unbelievably patient with the delays in getting the document completed. Andres - I owe you several large drinks.

You can download the report here.

Ostrasleuth

Hilary Ostrov is still sleuthing away at some of the inconsistencies in the various versions of how the Climategate emails made their grand entrance.

UEA says it doesn't have Dennis emails

UEA has responded to the request by the mysterious Mr/Ms Tuppen for Paul Dennis's emails.

The University does not hold any copies of correspondence between Mr. Paul Dennis and Stephen McIntyre, Anthony Watts, Jeff Id (aka. Patrick Condon and Jeff Condon), Steven Mosher, or Thomas W. Fuller for the period 2006 to date.

For FOI geeks like me this is not unexpected. Paul Dennis indicated that he has deleted his local copy of the emails so the only copy will be on a backup server. IIRC someone (perhaps the ICO) has said that if the information is only on a backup server then it is not "held", although whether this is something that would stand up in court is another question. My guess is therefore that there may be more to the university's refusal than meets the eye.

RC

With RC's (putative) reappearance on the scene, I think we need an alternative handle for the guy. "RC" is just going to get confused with RealClimate. "The hacker" or "the leaker" assumes we know more than we do.

Can we think of some snappy alternative along the lines of Watergate's "Deep Throat"? Deep Climate is already taken, of course, but I would have thought we could come up with something else. Perhaps still with the initials "RC"?

+++Has the Climategate hacker just spoken?+++

Afficionados of the Climategate story know that the person behind the disclosures signed themselves "RC", a reference presumably to RealClimate. They linked to a file called FOIA.zip on the RealClimate server.

Steve M has been speculating that RC was a UEA insider, who held back some important parts of the email archive as a bargaining chip:

Click to read more ...

FOI-ing Paul Dennis

Paul Dennis left this comment on the Suspicious Mind thread:

...yesterday the UEA did receive a FOIA request for copies of all my correspondence, email and mail, between myself and McIntyre, Condon, Watts, Mosher and Fuller. This is an interesting list of names. It's public knowledge that I had sent maybe 10 emails to McIntyre over the past 4 or 5 years some of these asking about the climategate release of emails, 1 email to Condon sending him a copy of my paper on the Gomez Glacier which had relevance for his work on Antarctic temperatures, particularly with reference to the lower Peninsula. It's not, as far as I know, on the public record that I had a very brief correspondence with Tom Fuller immediately after climategate. This amounted to 2, maybe 3 emails. To my recollection I have never corresponded with Mosher or Watts. I have never spoken, or written by any other means with any of the named correspondents.

Click to read more ...

Suspicious mind

Autonomous Mind has been looking at the story of the Guardian's outing of Jeff Id and remains suspicious of what went on. I'm not convinced myself - what do you think?

A change in the message

Hilary Ostrov has a fascinating post in which she examines the way UEA's message developed in the weeks after Climategate and thinks she perceives the point at which the Outside Organisation became involved.

Civil servants protect their own

When pondering the ethical contortions of the various inquiries into the Climatic Research Unit, I sometimes wonder whether there was ever any chance of anyone being found guilty of anything. As Doug Keenan has pointed out, there are tens of thousands of scientists in the UK and none has been found guilty of research fraud in the last twenty years. The idea that the scientific community here is populated entirely by choirs of seraphim and cherubim is, of course, not credible, so we are left to conclude that bad behaviour by scientists is, in the normal run of things, completely ignored. And it's not just the scientists, of course. It has been pointed out that only 18 teachers have been fired in England in the last 40 years.

Click to read more ...

UEA and the Outside Organisation

When the links between UEA and some of the people involved in the phone hacking scandal became clear, I put an FOI request into the university asking for their relevant correspondence. Today I've had a response:

We are assembling the requested information and it is clear that it is possible that to provide the information if it is held will require an assessment of the public interest. We are currently undertaking this assessment.

It is therefore anticipated that this will require an additional 10 working days to process the request above and beyond the current deadline of 15 August 2011 giving a revised deadline of 30 August 2011. If this timescale needs to be revised you will be advised as to the reasons and provided with a revised timescale.

Here we go again...

More from the police

Norfolk Constabulary have now made a somewhat fuller disclosure of information about their dealings with the Russell inquiry, making available some of their correspondence.

Although they are not mentioned in the Norfolk disclosures, the first meeting between the Russell panel and Julian Gregory, the policeman in charge of the investigation, dates back to the end of 2009, when Russell visited Norfolk for exploratory talks. He was joined by Norton for a second meeting at the end of January 2010. The Russell panel has withheld the minutes of these meetings on the grounds that they might prejudice the police investigation.

Click to read more ...

UEA response to EIR requests – it depends who you are

This is a guest post by Richard Brierley.

This post is written to publicise an interesting anomaly in UEA’s treatment of requests sent to it under the Environmental Information Regulations.

Readers should know that my interest is only in compliance with EIR Regulations.  I am neither qualified nor sufficiently knowledgeable to get to the meat of some of the requests for data from UEA or to understand it even if it is disclosed.  I am a lawyer by training and the recent QUB and UEA ICO cases have interested me greatly – they have shown a strong reluctance on the part of these publicly funded organisations to retain for their own benefit the work for which we have all paid.  Thus is identified a friction between what those institutions consider to be their valid interests and what the Regulations provide – public access.  I have become highly interested in the way in which these interests are balanced and my preference is in favour of public access, (which is under the Regulations the presumption from where we all start), to information created or produced with tax payer money.

Click to read more ...

Climategate emails online

A few people have emailed in recent weeks to say that the online versions of the CRU emails have disappeared from the web. I'm therefore grateful to Marcel Crok for pointing me to this version at YourVoiceMatters.

What's the deal with Norfolk Police?

Updated on Jul 19, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Jul 19, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Norfolk Police have decided to disclose the £10k invoice that they sent UEA at the start of the year.

The covering letter for the FOI disclosure is here. The constabulary's explanation for the transaction is as follows:

Whilst conducting their investigation into the acquisition of data from the computers at the University of East Anglia, the Investigation Team engaged the services of a company with the ability to forensically examine the relevant server from the UEA. The Independent Review, chaired by Sir Muir Russell, subsequently requested access to certain data on this server and the Constabulary facilitated the request by acting as a conduit to confirm the requirement and the cost of meeting it. Norfolk Constabulary was subsequently invoiced for all work undertaken and UEA subsequently reimbursed the Constabulary for the work that had been completed at their request.

Click to read more ...