The IPCC's private portals

Readers may remember that several months ago, Chris Horner reported that people working for the IPCC had set up private portals, apparently to allow them to communicate without being subject to FOI legislation. The original story at WUWT is here and Horner does not mince his words, noting the parallels with the Abramoff case.

Horner responded to this news by issuing a FOIA request for any related correspondence held by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and a partial response has now been received. Roughly two thirds of the responsive documents are being withheld.

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Show us yer code

John Graham-Cumming, Les Hatton and Darrell Ince are all well known around these here parts. John Graham Cumming was quite prominent after Climategate for his critiques of the standard of CRU's computer code. Darrell Ince wrote an article making similar criticisms. Les Hatton was mentioned as the author of an article criticising the IPCC's handling of hurricane data.

The three of them have just published a new paper in Nature, looking at the issue of code availability and trying to address the question of how we can move to a world in which academic computer code is routinely made available.

Government slaps down universities

According to an article in Times Higher Education, the government has rejected the attempt by Universities UK to have further exemptions inserted into the FOI Act that would benefit academics at the expense of the public.

Home Office minister Lord Henley said this week that he believed that “adequate protection already exists” for pre-publication research.

The Act already exempts information if it will be published in the future or if it would be commercially damaging.

Lord Henley acknowledged that “adequate safeguards must exist within information rights legislation to make sure that that position [of universities] is not undermined through inappropriate and premature disclosure.”

Supreme Court rejects Sugar case

The appeal of the late Stephen Sugar against the decision of the appeal court that the BBC is exempt from FOI has been unanimously rejected by the Supreme Court. The corporation is to remain beyond scrutiny.

Evidence to the Justice Committee

Written evidence to the Justice Commitee's post-legislative review of the FOI Act has been published. David Holland and I are both included, as is someone who was visited by police as a result of placing a FOI request to UEA.

Twenty-three universities and two umbrella groups for universities have submitted evidence too.

Public interest or vested interest? It's a tight call for the committee.

Public should be charged to see their own papers

Updated on Feb 14, 2012 by Bishop Hill

That, apparently, is the hope of senior civil servants. A report in the Telegraph says that they are annoyed with the Freedom of Information Act:

Officials are said to be frustrated at spending hours researching the answers to requests for disclosures under the Freedom of Information Act.

Civil servants believe that the laws, which were introduced to make government more open, could have had the opposite effect by making officials less willing to keep written records which could become public.

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Information Commissioner on academic data

Just in time to distract from my blushes (see previous post), comes the news that the Information Commissioner has spoken out on the efforts by academics to get themselves exempted from FOI laws.

"Is academic research really threatened by the prospect of premature release of data sets? Are ministers living in fear?" Graham asked a government computing conference last week. "The Chicken Licken version of the FOI that the sky is falling is just that: it's a folktale – and the trouble with folktales is people start reacting to what the think is the case even when it isn't."

He didn't name names, but two particular chickens spring to mind: chiefs in Whitehall and academics such as those whose work has helped give climate research a bad name.

Sir John's emails

A few weeks back, readers may remember, the Information Commissioner ruled that where public servants used private email accounts to conduct public business, their messages were still subject to FOI. With this in mind I decided to ask the Met Office for Sir John Houghton's emails relating to the IPCC's Third Assessment Report. I copied my message to Sir John's email address at the John Ray Initiative - the evangelical programme which now appears to occupy much of his time.

Attentive students of the Climategate emails will have noticed that Sir John appeared to use a private email address for all of his work on this most controversial of reports.

A week or so ago, the Met Office replied.

I am writing to advise you that, following a search of our paper and electronic records, I have established that the information you requested is not held by the Met Office. Sir John Houghton has also confirmed that he does not hold private e-mails relevant to your request.

So it appears that Sir John has deleted historic records relating to his work on the Third Assessment Report - work that was funded by the UK taxpayer.

Hanging the laundry out

In an article entitled Global warming’s ‘dirty laundry’, The Washington Times has called for the University of Virginia to release Michael Mann's emails.

Mr. Mann insists disclosure would have a chilling effect. “Allowing the indiscriminate release of these materials will cause damage to reputations and harm principles of academic freedom,” he wrote in an August letter to UVA.

As important as it is to protect Mr. Mann’s feelings from being hurt, trillions of dollars are at stake with climate-policy decisions being made based on his work. From cap-and-trade to the Kyoto treaty, it’s not enough to make a choice based solely on a trust that this secretive cabal of climate scientists is telling the truth. The taxpayers paid Mr. Mann; they deserve to know exactly what they were getting for their money.

So far, the Climategate disclosures have unmasked shoddy methods in service of a leftist public-policy agenda. Compelling release of all communications - dirty laundry and all - is the only way to provide the full context. Let an informed public decide on its own whether they’ve been hoodwinked by charlatans, or that the sky really is falling.

The point is an important one. Mann would have us believe that he is just bashful about his laundry being seen in public. But the public needs to know that there's nothing worse to be revealed.

Who pays for Brendan?

Brendan Montague has written a report on the Information Tribunal hearing into GWPF's seed funder. There's not a lot new to tell the truth, apart from the fact that our Brendan is being represented by a barrister.

Now a couple of days back Leo Hickman told me that this pursuit of GWPF's funders was a personal initiative by Brendan

No 3rd party is "funding" the request. Montague is doing it himself. Believes in transparency etc

I've asked the question and today Leo has said that Montague is paying the barrister himself.

Hmm.

I've left a comment at the bottom of Brendan's article.

Update on Jan 27, 2012 by Bishop Hill

I'm sure I recall Brendan telling me how tough life as a freelance journalist was when he came to visit me in 2010. Business sure must have been good since then.

The Education Secretary and s77

This is interesting. Left foot forward is reporting that the education secretary Michael Gove is being investigated for possible breaches of the FOI Act.

Presumably, even if Gove has been breaching the Act, no prosecution will be possible because of the six-month statute of limitations that readers here know applies to such cases.

So I guess Gove, like everyone at CRU, will carry right on as if nothing had happened.

Mann's emails - part 1

The American Tradition Institute has had sight of some of Michael Mann's emails, as part of its ongoing battle to get the University of Virginia to comply with its legal obligations. Its press release can be seen here.

The selected emails include graphic descriptions of the contempt a small circle of largely taxpayer-funded alarmists held for anyone who followed scientific principles and ended up disagreeing with them. For example, in the fifteenth Petitioners’ Exemplar (PE-15), Mann encourages a boycott of one climate journal and a direct appeal to his friends on the editorial board to have one of the journal’s editors fired for accepting papers that were carefully peer-reviewed and recommended for publication on the basis that the papers dispute Mann’s own work. In PE-38, he states that another well respected journal is “being run by the baddies,” calling them “shills for industry.” In PE-39 Mann calls U.S. Congressmen concerned about how he spent taxpayer money “thugs”.

Update on Jan 26, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Steve M notes that these are Climategate emails and therefore not new. I'm slightly bemused by the ATI headline, which suggests otherwise.

Climate scientists want no oversight

Revkin reports on the involvement of an organisation called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility in a legal defence fund for climate scientists. I was interested in this bit about the application of FOI to universities:

Q: Finally, when the issue is the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), there’s a murky line between what is fishing and what isn’t. Many FOIA requests of green groups over the years could be cast as such. This is one reason the Union of Concerned Scientists, for example, has walked a fine line in its statements on abuse of FOIA. Should a researcher using a state university e-mail address and working under federal grants be entitled to presume his/her correspondence is “private” (as described below)?

A: The central issue is whether the subject of the inquiry is public business. Generally, scientific articles submitted in the author’s name with a disclaimer that the work does not represent the institution falls outside what is official business. Our main concern is that industry-funded groups and law firms are seeking to criminalize the peer review process by obtaining internal editorial comments of reviewers as a means to impeach or impugn scientists.

The grants themselves and the grant reports are public but a federal grant does not transform a university lab into an executive branch agency – which is the ambit of FOIA.

By the way, as an adjunct to our whistleblower practice, PEER makes extensive use of FOIA to force disclosure of matters other wise buried in agency cubicles. A good example of one our science-based FOIA [requesets] is this.

"...seeking to criminalize the peer review process by obtaining internal editorial comments of reviewers as a means to impeach or impugn scientists"? Huh?

It can't be said often enough. If you want public money you have to accept public oversight.

A major FOI victory

This post is a jointly written effort by myself and Don Keiller.

Readers may remember the Information Commissioner's ruling last year that UEA had to release the CRUTEM data sent by Phil Jones to Peter Webster at Georgia Tech. This had been requested by Jonathan Jones and Don Keiller.

This ruling was obviously very welcome, but in fact it was not the end of the story. UEA had put forward an argument that CRUTEM data was held under agreements with national meteorological services and could not therefore be disclosed to outsiders. Along with his request for the data, Keiller had therefore also requested the covering email that Phil Jones had sent to Webster, which should presumably contain caveats about reuse and disclosure. However, when the Information Commissioner ordered UEA to release the data,  UEA's non-disclosure of the email was upheld, on the grounds that the information was, on the balance of probablilities, 'not held'.

Click to read more ...

What the greens spend their money on

Leo Hickman reports that a group called the Request Initiative is pursuing an FOI request against the Charities Commission, trying to force them to release details of who is funding GWPF.

Request Initiative is an organisation that places FOI requests on behalf of charities and NGOs. It is run by a chap called Brendan Montague who, by strange coincindence, came to interview me in at the end of 2010, on the first anniversary of Climategate. At that point he explained that he was a freelance journalist and was writing a story about the Climategate anniversary. Strangely, nothing ever appeared. I therefore note with interest that he placed his first FOI request to the Charities Commission about GWPF in 2010. I wonder if the "freelance journalist" bit was therefore not entirely true. I can't remember whether we discussed GWPF and its funding at all but I wouldn't have been able to tell him anything about it anyway. My recollection is that we talked mainly about Climategate.

In passing, I note that the use of an intermediary such as Request Initiative essentially conceals the identity of the requester. I wonder which NGO is so bashful about its activities? When I chanced upon the original FOI request on the web, I asked Bob Ward - the most obvious source - if he was involved. He appeared to be very reticent about replying but eventually said that he had nothing to do with it.

As for the FOI request, it has now apparently worked its way up to the Information Tribunal. I can't see that it will meet with any success there. I'm no expert in the DPA, but I can't see an argument that there is a public interest in disclosing donors' names because GWPF are a bunch of liars (or word to that effect) meeting with much success. In fact I would have thought that GWPF the Charities Commission would have a good case to ask for their costs to be paid.

Update on Jan 23, 2012 by Bishop Hill

On Twitter, FOI blogger Bainsey points us to the Information Commissioner's original decision and comments that the argument for the information to be withheld under s40 looks strong.