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.

Mann lecture at Penn State

A video of Mann's recent lecture at Penn State is available here.

I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, so feel free to point out any points of interest in the comments. The few seconds I have looked at suggest that there wasn't a big turnout for the great man.

Ivory-tower activists

I had an interesting exchange of tweets the other day with Tamsin Edwards. She had noted that she was off to a conference called Planet Under Pressure, and I gently inquired whether this was a suitable conference for a scientist to be attending at public expense - it certainly looks like an activist gathering to me, although in fairness there are also a few scientific sessions.

I think everyone would agree that the public is funding scientists to make scientific discoveries. Whether they are also paying for outreach efforts seems to me to be a moot point. The line between making the public aware of what is going on in science and using science as a tool in an ongoing political struggle seems to me to be one that is fraught with difficulty. There is little doubt that many residents of the ivory tower are little more than publicly funded political activists - a form of corruption if ever there was one. (For the avoidance of doubt, I don't believe that Tamsin E is one of these - indeed I'm not even sure that there are many such among the ranks of climate scientists, strictly defined).

Is there any way of making a clear delineation of what is acceptable or unacceptable for scientists to do with their public funding? Or is this sort of abuse and corruption of taxpayer largesse simply a feature of the system rather than a bug?

Quackery? Josh 143

H/t to Tallbloke who spotted the homeopathy quote by Gavin over at Realclimate. Check out his post here. Judith Curry has a much more sensible view on Kevin's Missing heat here.

Cartoons by Josh

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.

Sceptic letter in WSJ

A group of prominent sceptics have published a letter in the Wall St Journal:

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.

(H/T James Evans in Unthreaded)

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.

Warm weather - Josh 142

George Monbiot's hilarious article 'Do the weather forecasters used by the Daily Mail actually exist?' is well worth reading. Although we know that weather is not climate (except when it is) one can't help but see some parallels.

Click to read more ...

Brisbane floods redux

Remember last year's floods in Brisbane? There were some interesting exchanges in the comments on my posts on the subject, with some differences of opinion between those who thought that the dams had been mismanaged, perhaps in response to green-initiated concerns over droughts - and those who thought otherwise (see here, here and here).

Earlier in the week, it was revealed that the dam in question was operating on a low-release strategy on the eve of the floods, rather than seeking to lower levels in the reservoir ahead of the deluge. Interestingly, evidence has also emerged that the official inquiry into the affair was not what it should have been, overlooking several key documents.

Now why does that sound familiar?

Off topic threads

The threads are getting out of hand again. I have imposed a timeout on BBD until Monday.

Quote of the day

A man may stand to gain a great deal of peace and quiet from telling his wife that he loves her. But he may really love her nonetheless.

Jamie Whyte on the motivational fallacy (H/T James D)

Huhne file goes to CPS

Guido reports that Essex police has passed a file about Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Chris Huhne, to the Crown Prosecution Service.

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.