Wednesday
Jul072010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill The ICO rules
Jul 7, 2010 The Information Commissioner has ruled on David Holland's EIR request - the one that was so central to the Climategate affair. This appears to be very important. In essence the Commissioner has set a wider rather than a narrower scope on EIR by ruling that information need not have a direct effect on the environment for it to be subject to the regulations. UEA have been found to be in breach of the regulations.
Full story here.
Reader Comments (12)
A good result!
I suspect this will not be the last EIR request that is submitted!
Let's see whether CRU takes any notice whatever of the exceedingly mild finger wagging Muir Russell gave them. I'm not holding my breath, however.
Sounds like it is a technicality. i.e. they took too long to refuse. It did not rule that the refusal was unjustified. I am not sure if this is really a win.
No Tim, its not a technicality. UEA broke Regulation 5(2) as well as 14(2).
The real point is that Climate Change and the IPCC assessment of it is now clearly ruled to be subject to the Environmental Information Regulations 2004. The Palaeo boys have a mountain to climb in AR5. Not only will they be subject ad hoc requests but they will also face real legal pressure to pro-actively publish data and code.
Reading the ICO's ruling, it sounds like regardless of your decision not to pursue the matter further, David, the ICO will be "watching". It doesn't even rule out action against UEA/CRU independent of your complaint, which must have the UEA on the edge of its chair. That's where it should be. The UEA's history of disregard for its legal and (given the importance of the detail) moral obligations simply could not be allowed to continue into the future.
It's a good (and right) decision from the ICO. The purpose has always been to force UEA/CRU into compliance with its legal obligations and clearly your efforts for the cause will have positive ramifications for all of us concerning ourselves with the integrity of the science from here on. We will all reap the benefit of your work.
Congratulations, David, on your significant victory and many, many thanks!
Cynicism suspects that AR5 will regurgitate decades-old Warmist memes, all thoroughly discredited, with spurious updates immersed in pseudo-academic techno-babble. Upon request, this mindless agitprop will be disseminated to all and sundry without the slightest intent of engaging any objective, rational debate. Having ignored all substantive dissent from phony models' hoicked-up circularities, the Green Gang will go its merry way rejoicing, secure in wastrel grants poisoning genuinely scientific wells.
Over near eight months from last November, hysterics such as Briffa, Hansen, Jones, Mann, Trenberth et al. have fallen strangely silent. Only Climate Cultists' Cheshire grin remains, made manifest by sad-sack commentators such as Monbiot, Romm, Schmidt, above all Railroad Raj Pachauri's ludicrously malfeasant IPCC. However long this Clown Parade continues, it seems the fit is passed-- despite tremendous damage to New Zealand and other feckless victims, June's G20 mutual admirers joined in ducking any new initiatives.
Josh
Need a cartoon of David over Goliath.
Don't be quick to dismiss this report. It sets up Honesty, Rigor and Openess as essential to the scientific enterprize. It passes CRU on two of these and fails them on one.
Openess does not mean FOI. It means telling what you did and how you did it.
The pass on Rigor and Honesty is marginal: according to the report : "misleading but unintentional". i.e.; guys not knowing what they are doing.
Do I take it that this means that any subsequent research may be questioned through FOI requests and that CRU will have to respond with appropriate information?
If so then this should mean that their research will have to be airtight. Will there perhaps be a level playing field from now on
Stephen,
Are you the "blast from the past" or just a namesake?
The Decision Notice is just part of the body of "case law" that is developing and many others have put in at least as much effort as me to build it. The important thing about the Commissioner's clear ruling on the classification of climate change assessment is that it will get increasingly difficult for public authorities to ignore the EIR and extemporise relying on the lack of any effective statuary time limit under FoIA.
UEA, the Met Office, Oxford and Reading decided collectively to "resist" my request by ignoring the EIR despite my putting to them the existing case law. They knew they could delay any disclosure for up to two years. Recently there has been a marked improvement in the handling of requests.
Ofcom also refused to accept a request under the EIR, delayed for six months and released absolutely nothing. However, faced with a Decision Notice that said the EIR applied to the request and an appeal to the Information Tribunal, Ofcom have promptly released most of the correspondence relating to its adjudication of what it claimed was an Official fairness complaint from the IPCC over the The Great Global Warming Swindle. The documents released show the IPCC made no complaint, official or otherwise. Nor did anyone other than Dave Rado claim to be making a complaint "on behalf of" the IPCC. Ofcom are now conducting an internal enquiry.
The next battle is to try to force public authorities to comply with Regulation 4 which means they should publish all environmental information progressively. The UEA emails were not private. They were written and stored at public expense and I for one will be pressing for all emails relating to the assessment of climate change held by public authorities to be published.
In short, it levels the playing field for the little guy at least a little. Still an impressive win, David. Congratulations.
One small step for david, one large headache for goliath.
Congratulations david, those of us who for whatever reason are unable to contribute to this struggle are relying on you and your colleagues to continue to press the authorities to fulfill their commitments and we know that it is not going to get any easier in the short term.
Thanks
Hi David
I humbly, suggest that I am unlikely to be known to you. I am a mere mortal (LOL), I used to be reasonably well known for recruitment in the electronics industry, just in case you do happen to know me.
I would like to add my thanks to anyone and everyone who is challenging the doomsday machines. The world may be about to end but I'd rather we had honest reliable information rather than lies. At the very least we may be able to more accurately generate a suitable response if the data is accurate.
Whilst the Winter weather worked well to discredit, the current warm weather is only feeding the fuel for "climate change" despite the fact that Summers have been very disappointing for the most part in the last 20 years.
Steve