Thursday, February 25, 2010

University Of East Anglia Strikes Back

Their entire submission to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology can be found here. As to the earlier claim from the U.K. Information Commisioner's Office (ICO) that UEA breached the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act), this is where that seems to stand:

3.7.6 On 22 January 2010, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) released a statement to a journalist, which was widely misinterpreted in the media as a finding by the ICO that UEA had breached Section 77 of the FOIA by withholding raw data. A subsequent letter to UEA from the ICO (29 January 2010) indicated that no breach of the law has been established; that the evidence the ICO had in mind about whether there was a breach was no more than prima facie; and that the FOI request at issue did not concern raw data but private email exchanges.

More on that particular aspect of the investigation here.

And a bit more on the many, many vexatious FOI requests filed by the denialist community:

3.7.4 In July 2009 UEA received an unprecedented, and frankly administratively overwhelming, deluge of FOIA requests related to CRU. These amounted to 61 requests out of a 2009 total of 107 related to CRU, compared to annual totals of 2 in 2008 and 4 in 2007 (University totals for those years were 204, 72 and 44 respectively). Accordingly CRU approached the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), an organization within the WMO, to see if it would request the WMO to seek permission from each of its members (the NMSs) for CRU to release the primary station data for each country. WMO declined, but indicated that the appropriate procedure was for the request to come from the UK NMS (the Met Office). The Met Office agreed this was the correct procedure, and sent a letter of support to accompany an explanatory letter to each NMS on 30 November 2009. As of 1 February 2010, 35 responses to 160 requests have been received from the NMSs. Most are positive, but some are negative (confirming the constraints preventing CRU releasing the requested data).

1 comment:

Ti-Guy said...

WMO: World Meteorological Organization.

NMS: National meteorological service?

You know, these berserkers are going to ruin access to information for the rest of us.