Judge expresses doubts over soundness of the Russell inquiry

The Information Tribunal has finally reached its decision over David Holland's request for access to the Russell inquiry's emails. The decision is that they should not be released.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that the decision seems to have been made on the grounds that David H failed to demonstrate that UEA were controlling the inquiry. These are the only grounds on which the Tribunal could have demanded that the emails be released. However, in the course of reaching that decision, the judge seems to have doubted the soundness of the inquiry:

...we find it surprising that there was no contractual document, and in particular, that there was no discussion between them about the information that would be received or generated by the ICCER. Professor Acton’s evidence is that he had the advice and input of other senior colleagues at the time he was setting up this inquiry. We would have thought, in any event, that it would be almost instinctive for Professor Acton, as an historian, to have taken an interest in the question of what would happen to the information after Sir Muir’s work was concluded, even if he wanted to ensure that it was held independently during the course of the inquiry itself. His evidence as to why there was no specific agreement on this issue, nor even any discussion, appears to be somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, he says that he and his colleagues did not turn their minds to it because they were focused on getting the inquiry up and running. On the other hand, he says that it was important that the UEA not have any claim to the information because that would have compromised the information people might have been prepared to give to the inquiry, and in turn, would have compromised its independence. The second position suggests that the issue was actively considered; the first suggests that it was not. Given that Professor Acton has stressed, throughout, the importance of the inquiry not only being independent, but being seen to be independent, we would have thought that a clear statement to the effect that the UEA would not have control over, nor even sight of the information received or generated by the ICCER, would have been important.

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Give us a clouseau - Josh 166

Cartoons by Josh

'Ello, 'ello, 'ello

From Scottish Sceptic:

So, it is with deep regret that I feel I have:

• Informed the Norfolk police of a likely crime at the UEA.
• Asked my MP (Jo Swinson) to inform the appropriate parliamentary authorities that they appear to have been lied to.
• Written to Sir Muir Russell (by way of the judicial appointments board) making him aware of these allegations.
• Initiated a complaint with the UK civil service against Sir John Beddington.

Interesting. Particularly the first point. I wonder what crime is alleged?

MSNBC on Climategate and the inquiries

There is a very interesting, if rather toe-curling, segment about Climategate and the inquiries on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC.

Although she kicks off with the normal straw man about hiding declines in global temperature, she soon moves on to something that is closer to the truth, explaining that hide the decline was about hiding the failure of the proxies to track temperatures in the period after 1960. This is good, but she then elides into an important piece of misinformation, by suggesting that this is an issue that only affects the post-1960 period. This is of course, not the case. Since nobody knows what causes the divergence, nobody knows whether it affects earlier periods or not, although of course there are strong suggestions that it does.

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Green Alliance on AGW and Russell

Updated on Jan 24, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Alice Bell has written a trailer for Brian Hoskins' lecture at Imperial last Monday - if everything goes technically to plan this should be available as a podcast shortly. The trailer includes Hoskins' recommendations for climate reading - at a newbie level.

Among the documents recommended by Hoskins is the Green Alliance's introduction to climatology, published last year. This was prepared by their own Rebecca Willis, with input from Hoskins and Simon Buckle of the Grantham Institute (the sciencey bit at Imperial, as opposed to the naked-green-activism bit at LSE), and Joanna Haigh of Imperial.

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Diary date, Notts

The Nottingham Trent University is having a lecture on climate change on 7 March. The speaker is Manoj Joshi of the National Centre for Atmospheric Science.

Climate change is one of the major environmental challenges facing humanity over the next century. Given its importance, the science of climate change encompasses many fields from the natural sciences to the social sciences. This talk will use the latest physical science to discuss three questions: is the world warming up; what are the causes; what will the impacts of climate change be?

Details here.

More from Norfolk Police

Readers may remember that I asked for Norfolk Constabulary's correspondence regarding the Russell inquiry - this was centred around the extraction of emails from the CRUBACK3 server by the police's forensic IT contractors, Qinetiq.

Although much correspondence was released, there were many redactions, few of which made any sense. I therefore launched an appeal and when this was (bien sur) rejected appealed to the Information Commissioner.

Although I have had no decision from the Commissioner, today I had another letter from the Constabulary:

We have engaged with the ICO throughout their consideration of your appeal.

As part of this engagement we have returned to the relevant third parties, the UEA/Muir- Russell Inquiry and the company Qinetiq, to again seek their views on whether information about the negotiation between them for the provision of a service should continue to be treated as information that attracted a duty of confidentiality. The parties advised that there are two significant factors that have come into play since the original response was made; the passage of time and a change in the commercial functions of Qinetiq. This has led to both third parties removing their objections to the release of information originally refused under section 41. Therefore, the Constabulary no longer has reason to apply the exemption and we can release the information. A further set of emails is attached.

The release is here. I don't see much of interest yet, although I need to check this to the first release. I don't recall that I was told that any emails were withheld completely. I'm also not sure that the gaps - the redactions - have now been filled in.

The Palutikoff email

Updated on Dec 18, 2011 by Bishop Hill

This is a guest post by David Holland.

Last time I googled 2526.txt to see if this email had been commented upon I did not find any. This is as near the smoking gun proof as we will get, that Professor Phil Jones’ instruction to delete all emails “re AR4” was complied with – at least using the team definition of the word “delete”. Note that on 29 May 2008 Jones had emailed,

“Mike [Mann], Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith [Briffa] will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis. Can you also email [Eu]Gene [Wahl] and get him to do the same? I don't have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar [Ammann] to do likewise. I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!! Cheers Phil”

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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.

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A philosopher on Climategate

I've always been rather unimpressed with philosophy and philosophers - I keep feeling that there is much less there than meets the eye. I don't think this article in the New York Times is going to change my opinion much. In it, philosopher Gary Gutting looks at the AGW `consensus' and Climategate and frankly doesn't make much of a case. Here he is on Climategate:

Some non-expert opponents of global warming have made much of a number of e-mails written and circulated among a handful of climate scientists that they see as evidence of bias toward global warming. But unless this group is willing to argue from this small (and questionable) sample to the general unreliability of climate science as a discipline, they have no alternative but to accept the consensus view of climate scientists that these e-mails do not undermine the core result of global warming.

The "consensus view" about the emails that Prof Gutting cites is an article about the Russell review, which was not exactly chock-full of climate scientists and was not exactly full of people who could be described as honest brokers either. Prof Gutting also seems to have missed the point about the emails - if they really show that the peer reviewed literature was largely closed to sceptics, then yes climate science as a discipline is unreliable.

UEA financials

UEA have relented and provided copies of the invoices I asked to see.

This has thrown some light on the issue I hoped to address, namely the status of the Russell panel. There are a couple of invoices in there that are addressed directly to the Climate Change Emails Review. This would appear to suggest that the panel was a "wholly-owned subsidiary". This would suggest to me that Muir Russell's emails are subject to FOI.

Sir Muir and form UEA4/5

Reader Matthu has got hold of some tantalising new information about the financial arrangements surrounding the Russell Inquiry. UEA have released to him copies of the claims for money made by Russell and Boulton. UEA claims of this type are made on form 4/5, the former covering occasional employees and the latter self-employed contractors. It appears that this is a single form though.

Unfortunately, only page 2 of Boulton and Russell's claims have been supplied, so it is not clear whether they have claimed as temps or as self-employed contractors. However, Matthu's request covered all financial source documents, so unless the university has "overlooked" any attached invoices, it looks as though they were temps. Matthu has queried this aspect with the university to make sure.

Antarctic fox

I think I've mentioned that there was a certain amount of fraternisation across party lines at the reception after the Cambridge Conference. Josh and I had a nice chat to Dr Emily Shuckburgh, who is works at the British Antarctic Survey as well as being a scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

Since that time we've exchanged a few emails and, with my recent blog posts touching on the issue of ocean heat mixing, Dr Shuckburgh thought one of her video diary entries from the Southern Ocean might be of interest.

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Childish games from UEA

On Monday, the deadline passed for a request I had made for financial information relating to the Climategate inquiries. This was for (1) a report, at invoice level, of monies expended re the Climategate inquiries and (2) Copies of invoices and other documentation to go with them.

I chased the university today and received a response as follows:

...it has come to my attention that, in order to provide a response as requested to question 2 of your request, the amount of time and money required to locate and extract the requested information will exceed the statutory appropriate limit as mandated in section 12(1) of the Act and described in the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004. Providing a response to this question alone would likely exceed the appropriate limit. However, pursuant to s.16 of the Act, I would ask whether you would be satisfied with just a response to question 1 of your request? We anticipate that we could provide a response to that question within the statutory appropriate limit.

So, after the deadline passes, they ask for clarification. They claim in their letter that this allows them to restart the clock, but unfortunately they forgot to tell me that within the deadline, so they breached the law anyway - you know, the one they made a formal undertaking to comply with.

I've asked for the part 1 - the invoice listing - immediately, and will assess what to do after that.

Sir John responds

The "government" has responded to the Science and Technology Committee's report into the UEA inquiries.

After two independent reviews, and two reviews by the Science and Technology Committee, we find no evidence to question the scientific basis of human influence on the climate.

We note that this report from the Committee makes recommendations aimed at strengthening the transparency of scientific research, and that the principle of transparency is one to which the Government is fundamentally committed.

Which I guess is pretty much as expected.

The report was apparently prepared by the Government Office for Science - Sir John Beddington's crowd - with input from various other ministries. One wonders what input the government actually had, apart from applying a signature to the document in question.

I'll take a look at the report in more detail in a moment, but first I want to say something about Sir John's role in the Climategate affair. We know that the first person UEA's Trevor Davies wrote to when the story broke was Sir John. We know that Sir John pushed Lord Oxburgh, conflict of interest and all, to stand as chairman of the scientific inquiry, despite the noble lord's objections. We know that on completion of that inquiry, Sir John wrote to congratulate Lord Oxburgh, saying that all agreed that he had "played a blinder". We also know that Sir John was pivotal in getting the Russell panel to spend a lot of time on the peripheral issue of the surface temperature records.

And now he is personally responsible for putting together the government's response? And he tells us that there is no evidence that the scientific conclusions on the IPCC are undermined?

Are we expected to take this seriously?