“Thank you for sending your submission to the Science and Technology Committee’s inquiry into the disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. The submission will be made available to members of the Committee.

The Committee may make use of your evidence for the purpose of carrying out its inquiry, including-if it wishes-printing and publishing your evidence, or making it available for public inspection in the Parliamentary Archives. The Committee will not publish or otherwise disclose personal postal or e-mail addresses or telephone numbers. Once submitted, no public use should be made of your submission unless you have first obtained permission from the Clerk of the Committee.

If, on further consideration, there is information in your submission which you believe to be sensitive, you should contact the Clerk to explain what harm you believe would result from its disclosure. The Committee will take this into account when deciding whether to publish the evidence.

Details of the programme for the inquiry will appear in press notices and will be published on the Science and Technology Committee website at http://www.parliament.uk/science/.” End quote.

My emailed reply was –

Dear Mr/Dr Boyd,

The submission to which you refer can be used in public by you in its entirely. I wish to make no changes to my submission after reading your email below. I understand completely what your clear email says and means.

While I will not use wording from the submission without the permission of the Clerk, the matter is quite broad and of course I reserve the right to make private and public exchanges about the subject matter of the Inquiry, without quoting from my Inquiry material, or indeed even referring to the Inquiry.

I would be pleased if you made two small grammar corrections. The first is so that the relevant sentence reads “The Committee might make use of your evidence….” “May” implies permission, “might” implies probability.

The second suggestion is to rephrase “ … disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit …”. This could be read as a fact that the CRU was the source of the disclosure, as it might have been, but that is not established to my knowledge.

If you wish to make a direct quotation from my submission, I request that I see it in context before release. At other times and in other places, I have been quoted out of context in Parliamentary reports. I do not seek a repetition.

If you are establishing an automatic email notification broadcast system for statements from the Committee, would you please include me on the mailing list? There is limited success these days in asking a multiplicity of interested individuals to open a web site from time to time, merely to see if an addition has been made.

I wish you well with your Inquiry. I regard it as very important in the progress of science.
END of response.

The CRU inquiry gets started today but look for a whitewash. The Vice Chancelor of the uni said today that the enquirer has been working with the uni to understand and resolve the issues in one or two of the emails. He also said that they uni would be revisiting some of their major papers but doesn’t expect much in the way of changes because they were all peer reviewed.

Enter the langugage you’re looking to translate From and To in the appropriate fields, then paste the text or URL of a web page in the text box on the left. Click ‘Translate’ and watch the magic happen.

For web pages, it returns the original page on the left, with the translated version on the right.

Just paste the URL into the box and you’ll get back a machine translation that usually is good enough to understand.

Or click on
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.elsevier.nl%2Fweb%2FNieuws%2FWetenschap%2F257959%2FVVD-Uitleg-Balkenende-over-Nederlandse-klimaatblunders.htm&sl=auto&tl=en

A submission (opinion paper) is not evidence — so no — they will not hold copyright on your words — at least I can’t see it. If you hand in an original copy of a report or document with annotations by an author etc that proves something I think that would be evidence. Or a part, like you felt you had to submit a sample of seawater, a rock, a lost marble, an original document with a signature that proved a point etc.

I have “The rules of Evidence” here if you want direct quotes. Maybe google for a definition of evidence and the rules — I have not looked.

It also begs the question whether they would accept a sumission which was posted on a blog BEFORE being submitted to the inquiry.