Climate and FOIA
One of the questions I have about the climate scandal that I don’t think has been answered is, why were FOIA requests required in the first place?
I mean, if I were a scientist, and my painstaking research revealed an existential danger to life on Earth, I’d want to get the word out any way I could. I’d want other scientists to have full access to my data. I’d want them to replicate my results and confirm my conclusions.
Sure, there’d be those skeptics who couldn’t be convinced no matter what (see previous post about birthers and mention of the TANG memos), but if everyone who looked at my mountain of evidence without too much bias reached the same conclusion, that conclusion could be considered pretty sound.
If I really thought I’d found a serious threat that required immediate action, the one thing I definitely would not do is hang onto the data and dole it in minimum publishable units, for the sake of my career. And yet, that’s what it seems that the “scientists” at the University of East Anglia have been doing. In between destroying the data so there’s nothing left but their “corrected” version, of course.
It would have been a whole lot simpler and more convenient if, when FOIA requests came in, the “scientists” (who would have deserved that name) could have just pointed to their freely available repository of files and said, help yourself.
Another question I have is why those “scientists” were even allowed to hang onto that data. Did they personally buy it out of their own pockets? If so, then, yes, I suppose they owned it and could legally refuse to hand it over to anyone. But I don’t think they did.
So why didn’t the UEA simply order their employees to make the data freely available? Sure, that would have cost money to put the files in shape for release, but there are billions sloshing around in the global warming biz. They could have asked the UN for a grant. They could have asked the World Wildlife Fund. They could have asked Al Gore. They could have asked Parliament, or the U.S. Congress. They could have simply put an appeal on the Internet. They didn’t do any of that. Why not?
Why didn’t Parliament simply order the records released? If uncontrolled global warming occurs, it could harm Britain along with the rest of the world. If the major economies of the world are destroyed in an effort to stop global warming, it most certainly will harm Britain along with the rest of the world. Wouldn’t it make sense for the British government to compel its employees to reveal the data and allow a thorough review of the matter?
February 6th, 2010 at 9:12 am
Based on reading blogs out of the UK, there’s a tremendous amount I don’t understand about Universities and their desire to keep things private (I say this as a graduate of a college that is putting their undergraduate courses online, including lectures and notes).
One justification I heard on this, though, was that apparently the weather data was licensed from various countries and remains (at least in the researchers’ opinions) confidential data that they (the researchers) are not at liberty to release. Just why historical weather data rates this kind of protection I can’t fathom.
February 6th, 2010 at 10:17 am
That does make some sense, although if that’s the reason, wouldn’t that be their response to FOIA requests? “This data is licensed from Country X and we cannot legally release it; here’s their contact information, go for it.”
Also, if the problem is that the data is licensed from various countries, why didn’t the Copenhagen conference focus on inducing those countries to give it up to the world community? Since global warming, if it is occurring, is a, well, global problem, why would they refuse to give it up? They might not want to hand it over for free (they have budget problems too), but we could surely have bought it from them (we could buy it from them now, actually; who needs Copenhagen?). And if they absolutely refused to turn it over for any amount of money, wouldn’t that in itself tell you something about the quality of the data?