Tribunal Dates

This is a guest post by David Holland

BH readers may recall that I reported here that Tom Osborn had jumped the gun at CLB suggesting that I had not appealed the First Tier Tribunal decision to uphold the Met Office refusal to disclose the AR4 ZODs.

On Monday afternoon, 29 February if any BH readers are in London with nothing better to do they might look in at Field House, 15 Breams Building, EC4A 1DZ, before 2 pm to hear my oral request to the Upper Tribunal that it grant me permission to appeal.  I might also mention that my appeal to the Upper Tribunal on the University of Cambridge refusal to disclose Peter Wadhams RE report is also listed to be heard at Field House at 10:30 am on 15 April.

FOI: Coyne ridiculous

As many readers are aware, our old friend Stephan Lewandowsky has recently published a paper in Nature that sets out his views on the circumstances in which scientists should release their data to others - the thrust of the piece being that he thinks that a favourable answer need only be given to his mates.

I had rather rolled my eyes at this and wondered if I actually wanted to give him the attention that a rebuttal might bring, so I had resolved to ignore it. However, a post by Professor James Coyne, a psychologist who works in Groningen in the Netherlands, suggests that Lewandowsky's article is just part of a wider trend in academia.

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Money without accountability

The Mail is reporting that universities are trying to put themselves beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act. 

Ministers in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills are consulting on whether to remove universities from the law, which obliges public bodies to respond to requests for information about their finances and how they operate.

The proposal is in a consultation document on education reform and comes on top of another, hugely controversial, review of the Act ordered by the Cabinet Office.

There is no point in having a publicly funded dreaming spire if the public can see that all you are doing is dreaming.

The judge, the presidential hopeful and some strange conflicts of interest

Updated on Oct 7, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Donna Laframboise has been doing some interesting research on the Climate and Law conference recently held by the UK's Supreme Court. It seems that as well as Philippe Sands, several other judges used the occasion to advance their environmentalist views.

Prominent among them was Lord Carnwath, who called the Paris conference a test of our ability to address the challenges of climate change. It does seem extraordinarily unprofessional - if not outright corrupt - of these people to use public funds and their positions of public trust to promote their ideological fads.

Carnwath is an interesting chap. I read for example that tomorrow he is to hear a case in which Donald Trump tries to prevent an offshore windfarm being built next to his golf course development in Aberdeenshire.  At the start of the year he took part in a ruling on the Viking windfarm in Shetland, rejecting attempts to prevent it going ahead. He was also involved in a case in which a group called "Client Earth" forced the UK to formulate new air quality standards.

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More dark arts from environmental journalists?

Paul Thacker. Image from, erm, the Harvard Center for EthicsJudith Curry is looking an article at PLOS by Paul Thacker and Charles Seife about freedom of information as it applies to universities. The authors are focusing on attempts to investigate industry funding of researchers in the area of genetically modified organisms, but also cover well-known FOI requests for information from climatologists. They tread a fine line between trying to argue that it was OK for Michael Mann's work to remain secret and arguing that in general it should be open to concerned citizens.

There is an interesting twist to the tale, when Thacker and Seife discuss a Keith Kloor article about a University of Florida GMO researcher named Kevin Folta, suggesting that Kloor had failed to mention that Folta was a paid consultant to Monsanto:

The article also does not report on an email titled “CONFIDENTIAL: Coalition Update” from the researcher to Monsanto in which the scientist advised Monsanto on ways to defeat a political campaign in California to require labeling of GMO products.

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Gray lady

The BBC for once has published a story that could credibly be seen as justifying its taxpayer funding - a fascinating profile of the head of ethics at the Cabinet Office, Sue Gray. The misdeeds of civil servants is something of a theme at BH, but I was particularly interested in this story because as far as I can tell it was Ms Gray who cleared Lord Deben's appointment as head of the Committee on Climate Change despite knowing that he had a conflict of interest.

The story paints a picture of an over-powerful Whitehall official, who seems to operate with an almost total disregard for the law, particularly on FOI. This would not be the first time we have come across public sector officials behaving like this - recall for example the breaches of the law by UEA. Nor is it the first time we have noted the almost complete lack of any consequences suffered by the perpetrators.

Update on Jul 13, 2015 by Bishop Hill

There is a related story here.

Diary date - FOI tribunal edition

This is a guest post by David Holland

At 10 am On Friday 17 April, in Northampton, I have the dubious pleasure of squaring up for the second time against the Met Office over Zero Order Drafts of an IPCC Assessment Report. I am no Perry Mason and the hearing was not my idea, so I am not recommending that anyone turn up for a stellar performance from me. But if anyone in the area is contemplating an appeal of an FOI decision, it is an opportunity to see an oral hearing.

As you may know at the first oral contest with the Met Office, over the seven AR5 ZODs that had not been leaked, I lost.

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Dazed and confused in the AAAS

Three former presidents of the American Association for the Advancement of Science have written a piece in the Guardian decrying attempts by greens to obtain email correspondence of state-funded scientists using freedom of information requests. In it, they make this inapt comparison:

[The greens'] attack is reminiscent of ‘Climategate’, where the release of private emails did immense, unwarranted damage to the reputations of climate scientists. Now the vocal anti-GM lobby appears to be taking a page out of the Climategate playbook.

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More sauce

Another few hours and another FOI request. This time it's the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who are targeting correspondence of the hard-left senators who have been at the forefront of harassing sceptic scientists:

To EPA’s National Freedom of Information Officer,

On behalf of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), please consider this request pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 5 U.S.C. § 552 et seq.

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Sauce for the goose

This was probably predictable:

Washington, D.C. -- Today, the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal), in conjunction with the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic (FMELC) and the Caesar Rodney Institute (CRI), filed a Delaware Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) with the University of Delaware related to Dr. John Byrne, Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy and Distinguished Professor of Energy and Climate Policy.

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Academic freedom for me, but not for thee

When Chris Horner was trying to get hold of Michael Mann's emails, the academic establishment moved heaven and earth to ensure that everybody knew where they stood on the question, namely that exposure of an Mann's emails would be an affront to academic freedom. The legal establishment seemed to concur.

Strangely, however, it seems that if an academic is suspected of having (whisper it) free-market sensibilities then exposure of their emails is no longer an affront at all.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) stood by professors in the Wisconsin and Virginia cases, publicly criticizing broad requests for emails on politically charged issues as an assault on academic freedom.

The association hasn’t issued a statement this time around, which has drawn criticism from writers at some conservative publications and blogs, who accuse the organization of being hypocritical. 

In a post on the independent blog of Academe Magazine, which is published by the AAUP, John K. Wilson says the AAUP has always recommended that open-records requests be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Some pose a threat to professors' academic freedom, but some could reveal violations of academic freedom or standards, said Wilson, who is a co-editor of the blog and a member of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

Recalling Jonathan Haidt's observation that the hostility of the majority of social scientists to colleagues suspected of being free-market liberals or conservatives has damaged the credibility of their specialism, it is hard not to conclude that the credibility of the whole American education system will soon be at stake as well.

The human rights of Professor Wadhams

This is a guest post by David Holland.

I recently received the Information Tribunal decision in respect of my request to the University of Cambridge for Peter Wadhams' AR5 Review Editors’ reports.  It is short and to the point. The Tribunal dismissed my appeal on two separate grounds. As I read the decision, if unchallenged, it means that no employee of a public authority participating in any IPCC assessment, even if entirely at the public’s expense, can be required under the EIR to disclose environmental information created or received in connection with it, if their work was entirely voluntary.

Firstly, the Tribunal decided, based solely on Aarhus article 5(1)(a) that the Commissioner was entitled to re-interpret what I thought were the clear plain English definitions of “information held” in the Convention, Directive and Regulations to mean the opposite of what the Secretary the State’s statutory code of practice states.

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Informality in the ICO

This is a guest post by David Holland.

When the Information Commissioner's Office investigate a complaint its recent practice is for the case officer to outline what he or she proposes to do, beginning with,

Where possible the Information Commissioner prefers complaints to be resolved informally and we ask both parties to be open to compromise. With this in mind, I will write to the public authority and ask it to revisit your request. It may wish to reverse or amend its position. If it does, it will contact you again directly about this.

However, in the case of Peter Wadhams' Review Editor's reports as discussed here in April, the next thing that happened was a Decision Notice arriving by post. The key paragraph 11 of the Decision Notice reported that the University of Cambridge...

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Bureaucrats are above the law

From the USA come further evidence that the bureaucracy there is out of control and above the law. I suspect the same is the case here in the UK. The story revolves around Chris Horner's ongoing attempts to get hold of correspondence of senior staff within the Environmental Protection Agency and in particular their text messages. The response of officials seems to have been wholesale deletion of the relevant records, directly flouting data retention legislation.

...they are destroying them, illegally. This isn't a "gaping open-records loophole," it is wanton lawbreaking because the law is quite clear.

The texts EPA produced on Friday prove that EPA's IT system does not automatically delete text messages; that is, for messages not to be there now, they had to be deleted from the system.

These texts also show that not everyone destroyed all of their messages, as McCarthy has admitted she did. Her behavior was deliberate, serial and flagrant.

Congress is doing nothing; the Justice Department is doing whatever it can to ensure the lawbreaking goes unpunished. It is therefore down to the courts to enforce the law.

I'm not holding my breath.

Help needed

This is a guest post by David Holland

Readers may be aware that after WGI’s AR5 Report was released last year, I requested the Review Editors’ Reports from DECC, and from the Universities of Reading and Cambridge. The officials at DECC, who had moved across from Defra, followed their custom of making sure they do not to hold anything they might have to disclose. They took no steps to possess them and denied holding them. Reading appeared to have learnt from its AR4 experience and released the ones it held without a fuss. But Cambridge refused. I did not choose the title, “Regulator Capture”, in the Bishop Hill post on this matter, but now as I deal with my Tribunal written submission on Cambridge, it looks appropriate. The University of Cambridge claim that Professor Peter Wadhams’ records were not held to any extent for its own purposes because he had served the IPCC in a private capacity - just as Met Office Chief Scientist, John Mitchell, and others had claimed, unsuccessfully, in 2008. For this excuse Cambridge are relying on a relatively new Advice Note that I hope to convince the Tribunal has no basis in law.

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