Posts by RuhRoh

FOIA avoidance prominent in 'ClimateGate II' mails

From my perspective, the predominant 'theme' of the Climategate I tranche was the group effort to manipulate the message, along with many examples of 'groupthink' behaviour ( 'mind-guarding', etc. ) in the name of maintaining 'consensus' .

Along with many references to " the cause" , Tranche II has a lot of highly specific discussion of how to avoid required responses to an early FOI request. (The purported avalanche of ~'vexatious' FOI requests were arguably elicited by the initial UEA stonewalling of Mr. Holland's initial modest requests).

Mr. Holland was asking for copies of non-published 'wordsmithing' negotiations from the 4th IPCC report, which by IPCC rules are disallowed (but clearly did occur).

This led to the (tranche I) 'Delete all your email' note which was minimized in the various 'oversight' committees.

For example, from the 'readme' at kurthbemis;

" /// Freedom of Information ///

<2440> Jones:

I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process

<2094> Briffa:

UEA does not hold the very vast majority of mine [potentially FOIable emails] anyway which I copied onto private storage after the completion of the IPCC task.

<2459> Osborn:

Keith and I have just searched through our emails for anything containing “David Holland”. Everything we found was cc’d to you and/or Dave Palmer, which you’ll already have.

<1473> McGarvie/UEA Director of Faculty Administration:

As we are testing EIR with the other climate audit org request relating to communications with other academic colleagues, I think that we would weaken that case if we supplied the information in this case. So I would suggest that we decline this one (at the very end of the time period)

<1577> Jones:

[FOI, temperature data]

Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original

station data. "