The FOIA/Mole incident of July 2009 attracted much public interest and somehow seems connected to the subsequent Climategate events, though precisely how (and even whether) remains unclear. The incident was discussed in both Mosher and Fuller’s CRUTape Letters and Fred Pearce’s Climate Files, though not in Andrew Montford’s Hockey Stick Illusion (which was mostly complete prior to Climategate.)
Climategate 1.0 emails provided relatively little context on the CRU/East Anglia side of the incident. Climategate 2.0 changes this situation dramatically, as it contains a rich (though still, at times, frustratingly incomplete) documentation of the university’s side of events. (The Climate Audit side is, of course, exhaustively documented in contemporary posts and comments, starting here and continuing in threads for the next month or so.)
The FOIA/Mole incident has been central in self-serving rationalizations of Climategate events by institutional climate science. They’ve represented the affair as an attempt to “harass” climate scientists, claiming that the events vindicated many prior years of data obstruction. However, institutional climate science and their house organs (e.g. Nature) have failed to report the origins of the incident. Its proximate cause was an institutional mendacity incident. In July 2009, CRU had refused a FOI request for station data with the flagrantly untrue claim that language in their alleged confidentiality agreements prevented them from sending station data to “non-academics” (while not preventing them from sending the same data to sympathetic academics:
Regulation 12(5)(f) applies because the information requested was received by the University on terms that prevent further transmission to non-academics
This assertion was completely fabricated: there were no agreements that contained the claimed language. Climate Audit readers quickly recognized that the university’s assertion was fabricated and submitted FOI requests to the university for the supposed confidentiality agreements containing the alleged language. The university was unable to produce a single agreement with such language and quickly abandoned this line of refusal in favor of other lines of refusal – these new grounds of refusal still, however, relying on faith in agreements unseen.
The new Climategate 2.0 emails shed fresh light on the process leading to East Anglia’s fabricated claim about language that specifically prohibited the transmission of station data to “non-academics”. The emails show that the untrue claim was not made casually or by accident, but was carefully crafted through a process that included not just Phil Jones and FOI officer David Palmer, but also Michael Mcgarvie, UEA’s Director of Faculty Administration. It also seems unlikely that Mcgarvie would not have reported to his superiors in the Registrar’s office and beyond, but these reports (if they exist) are not in the Climategate dossier.
Although the university’s mendacity in this incident was one of the flashpoints that seems to have precipitated Climategate, it was not investigated by the Muir Russell “inquiry”. To do so would have required examination of Climategate 2.0 (and other) emails. Muir Russell made no effort to examine such emails until late in the review process. These late and feeble efforts were then resisted by Acton and the university administration and nothing came of them. Muir Russell nonetheless proclaimed in his press conference that, while CRU was “unhelpful” at times, the “rigour and honesty” of the scientists in question was “not in doubt”.
In preparing today’s review, I’ve made my own “edition” of the emails in which I’ve arranged threaded emails in chronological order. See here – link to follow.
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