The UK government has provided an incomplete response to Andrew Montford’s FOI request for copies of “correspondence or documentation” related to “the appointment of the [Oxburgh} panel or its deliberations”. However, even the incomplete information so far shows that UK government Chief Scientist John Beddington played a critical role. In addition, it contains the remarkable […]
I doubt that many inquiries are provided with documents in which the subject of the inquiry not only asks subordinates to delete documents subject to an FOI request, but also states in writing that he expects a subordinate to give an untrue statement to an official. And even rarer that an inquiry would not clarify […]
David Rose of the Mail places the Met Office obstruction of FOI requests squarely in the spotlight. The Met Office obstruction left a singularly bad taste with their sequence of untrue excuses for not producing John Mitchell’s Review Editor comments. First, they claimed that Mitchell had deleted all the emails concerning AR4. (This excuse came […]
Inquiries from Jonathan Leake of the Sunday Times resulted in the following statement on Jan 22, 2010 by Graham Smith, Deputy Commissioner, Information Commissioner’s Office. Smith stated that David Holland’s FOI requests were “not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation”, that it is an “offence for public authorities to act so […]
“Community” climate scientists (e.g. Nature, Realclimate) have been quick to accept the idea that CRU was prevented from releasing station data because of confidentiality agreements with originating meteorological services. Something that Nature and Realclimate didn’t discuss or even seem to notice – and the blind spot is symptomatic – is that Jones delivered “confidential” data […]
As noted in yesterday’s post, Nature recently editorialized: If there are benefits to the e-mail theft, one is to highlight yet again the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers, often in the form of endless, time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts. Governments and institutions need to […]
Climate scientists have recently been promoting the myth that providing data in response to FOI requests was interfering with their work. Nature uncritically accepted this myth in a recent editorial calling for action to protect climate-change researchers from “endless time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts.”: If there are […]
Around Dec 8, 2009, the UK Met Office released “value added” data for a “subset” of 1741 stations – see here, describing the release as follows: The data downloadable from this page are a subset of the full HadCRUT3 record of global temperatures, which is one of the global temperature records that have underpinned IPCC […]
Willis Eschenbach’s account of his FOI request has been published on other blogs (e.g. here ) but I’m re-publishing it because Willis actually sent it to me first and the events all played out and were documented in real time at Climate Audit (see here for posts on FOI). After pursuing matters until April 2007, […]
IPCC policies state that their process is supposed to be open and transparent and that all comments are to be archived. Previously, we observed that the Lead Author Responses to our Review Comments were completely unresponsive on key issues. Under IPCC policies, the Review Editor is charged with seeing that this doesn’t happen. John Mitchell […]
