The new batch of e-mails – “climategate 2.0″ – released this morning merits your attention:

http://climateaudit.org/2011/11/22/new-climategate-emails/#comments

I thought you might be interested to read the following email, which details about the Met deal with FOIs from journalists:

From:
Davies Merilyne – DoI
Sent:
06 June 2008 17:11
To:
MPS – Information Managers
Cc:
Duncan Andrea – DoI; Pallen Sarah E – DoI; Shankster Nigel J – DoI; Simmons Kevin –
DoI; Aldridge Shannon – DoI
Subject:
High Risk FoI Cases
Importance:
High

Dear Colleagues,

This email serves as a reminder to be alert to the issue of identifying High Risk FOIA
requests.

You will notice that when allocated a Freedom of Information Act request to deal with by
the Public Access Office, the log will contain the following phrase:-

You MUST obtain approval from DPA / Press Liaison and / MPS ACPO portfolio
lead before release if this request is from a journalist or identified as high
risk.

The management of FOIA and the potential release of information into the public domain
has to be consistent, corporate and within the legislative requirements of
FOIA. It is therefore vitally important to the MPS that those requests having the potential
to cause significant harm are identified at the earliest opportunity. Again,
ACPO guidance summarises HARM as follows:-

The undesired consequence of the disclosure of information which will or could lead to
the physical or mental harm to an individual, damage to property, loss of confidence or a
reduction in the effective provision of public service delivery, temporary or permanent.

With this in mind, the Public Access Office are categorising the following types of
request as HIGH RISK and would wish to be notified at the earliest opportunity of any
change to the status of a request from either normal > high risk or vice versa.

This High Risk assessment is over and above the normal Central Referral Criteria that
exists already and is purely for MPS purposes.

HIGH RISK

Covert Human Intelligence Source / Informant information
Registered Sex Offender or MAPPA related information
Information impacting on MPS Counter Terrorism Command
Surveillance Information
Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) information

Witness Protection Programmes
Any data falling with the realm of Section 23 or 24 Freedom Of Information.
(Security Bodies and or National Security Issues)
Any information relating to or requests from VIP’s (MP’s etc) and or Royal
Household
Covert or MPS secure IT systems

Procurement / high value contract information
Any unpublished MPS procedures
Any statistical information either Crime or HR, especially when from an identified
media source

Requests for Third Party Information in the hands of the MPS, ie: from the Home
Office, MPA, GLA, IPCC etc.
High Profile Investigations, ie; Stockwell, Cash for Honours etc.
Misconduct, Employment Tribunal or Civil Action Information

Any request involving an identified member of the Media.

The process is not intended to hinder or delay the release of information but to
ensure that we release consistent information and are properly prepared for any
potential consequences of the release.

Merilyne Davies
Head of Public Access Office
Data Protection Officer and Freedom of Information Lead

Search the worldwide version of Google News for ‘Wikileaks’. You’ll find journalists in pretty much every country writing articles about the contents of leaked documents – only in the UK and to a lesser extent the US do writers for serious newspapers complain about JA having holes in his socks or being mean to cats.

We get that you, David Leigh and James Ball don’t like the guy. You’ve all met him, so it’s a fair bet that he’s really not very likeable. We don’t need you all churning out article after article telling us so.

Please get back to doing proper journalism – we know you’re good at that. Lay off JA – he’s good at his job too and many of us believe what he’s doing is very important and he should be allowed to concentrate on that instead of a spat with a couple of UK papers.

“However, English libel law is one of the most restrictive of free speech in the world.”

With respect, your invocation of the reversal of the burden of proof isn’t in itself something that’s going to convince me that the English law of libel is unduly repressive of free speech. If one falsely accuses somebody of lying (quite a serious accusation) then I have no sympathy for this person being sued. Moaning about a minor linguistic contortion you have to go through in order to save your own skin in the absence of evidence is pretty childish.

Courts go to great lengths to ensure that comment which doesn’t contain outright character assassination or blatant lies do not lead to damages. Your mention of libel tourism is also, as far as I can tell, devoid of any actual evidence to back it up, despite how often it’s brought up by people backing libel reform. Besides, would you rather people whose reputations are being trashed are not able to claim some form of redress?

Be glad that, unlike in some parts of Europe (even France!), libel is not a crime. I would suggest that, in future, you stick to the topic you’ve started writing about, rather than dropping in some ill-thought out stuff about issues unrelated to your article.

Sections/ all of the police and undoubtedly this fascist government are merely carrying out the wishes of their masters …. it will soon be illegal to be a citizen in the uk.

You are an inspiration to many of us.

I would like to take this opportunity to inform any of your readers who are unfamiliar with what Climategate was really about.

The Russell Review initially refused to publish my evidence submission to it, and its Report states that it has not. However, it has in fact published, surreptitiously and deceitfully, selected bits. This is my original submission in full: http://tinyurl.com/2656ppl

The Climategate emails can be accessed here: http://tinyurl.com/3mgw7xr . They reveal many unsatisfactory aspects of the assessment of climate science by a comparatively small dedicated group. Some were dealt with in the submissions, which the Review did publish, but not the chain of deceitful events that led to Phil Jones’ career risking email to Mike Mann which he wrote just two days after I made a very specific formal information request. When asked about that email at the initial Russell Review press conference Jim Norton said “Clearly that one is of great interest to us.”

If we can rely upon its file modification date stamp, about an hour before the Russell Review Report itself was Released on 7 July 10, a critical evidence submission was added to the Russell Review Website. It was in the names of UEA’s Keith Briffa and Tim Osborn (B&O) and listed in the one of the 16 byzantine evidence index as “Responses from Keith Briffa and Timothy Osborn to questions from Geoffrey Boulton on Review membership”. This scarcely does justice to it, and nor does the actual title on the document, “Response to Specific Questions Raised by Professor Geoffrey Boulton, in his Letter of 6 May 2010, in his Role as a Member of the Muir-Russell Review Team”, but that is how it is referred to in the Report of he Russell Review on pages 80 and 81.

B&O’s evidence is here: http://tinyurl.com/5vtz5as. On page 23 of it, is Boulton’s letter in which he asks three questions and states, “A detailed account on which this allegation is based has been presented to us and is given in the annex to this letter.” Boulton’s annex was not shown, but it would be reasonable to suppose that it was one of the submissions that the Review received. B&O wrote in response,

“Given that virtually every statement in this Annex requires correction of some error of fact, interpretation or implication we believe it to be essential that our responses to these specific allegations as contained in the Annex are formally recorded. Our detailed responses are provided in the form of annotations, added where appropriate, in the accompanying version of the Annex. These are a fundamental part of our response and we ask that the Review Team consider them carefully in conjunction with the more general remarks given below.”

The Russell Review had emailed me in April saying no part of my submission would be published. However, to my to my surprise B&O’s annex included a fraudulently edited version of just a section of my submission, from which carefully selected printing and non printing characters had been removed significantly altering what I had written. In this section of my submission I had discussed the unpublished paper by Wahl and Ammann which which disputed the peer reviewed and published work of McIntyre and McKitrick, which as the last word in the literature proved the “hockey stick” to be invalid. The Reviewer for the government of the USA had complained in a review comment that it missed the deadline laid down to be “in press” and according to the rules all references to it had to be removed.

Two distinct paragraphs in my original submission were cited verbatim from a published IPCC document that described in separate paragraphs the rules for unpublished papers that were allowed to be cited in the IPCC Report. The first one described the deadline to be “in press” and the second an entirely different deadline by which a “final preprint” preprint of papers not yet published had to be available to the Expert Reviewers. Wahl and Ammann’s paper missed both and was invalid for other reasons. Remarkably the removal of a paragraph break, and, to disguise that fact, the quote mark from the following paragraph, enable B&O to write a rebuttal of my comment on those paragraphs which was plausible, but which they had to know was entirely false. They claimed there was no deadline to be “in press” only a vague reference to preprints, which in any case they had received directly even thought the Reviewers did not have access to it.

Worse was to follow. Paragraph number 44 of my original submission was entirely omitted. In it I had cited verbatim from Climategate email 1141180962.txt, in which Wahl as good as admitted that he knew his paper had missed the deadline. On 11 February 2006, Wahl had written,

“I had thought that we had passed all chance for citation in the next IPCC report back in December, but Peck [Jonathan Overpeck] has made it known to me this is not so.”

Based on the deceitful edit of my evidence and an unsigned statement allegedly supported by Dr Susan Solomon the Russell Review concluded that there was no breach of the IPCC “in press” deadline. However, the real reason for Jones’ email to Mann was not discussed in the edited section published in B&O’s evidence nor anywhere in the Russell Review Report. This, I argued, was that the deadline was retrospectively changed after the final Government and Expert Review stage by Jones, Overpeck and Solomon. This could be dismissed as a serious professional lapse. What could not however, is that, to disguise why the change was made, a memorandum containing a deliberate falsehood was sent to all 600 Expert Reviewers – but not to any governments. In Climategate email 1189722851.txt Jones as good as admitted that the Wahl and Ammann paper was only cited as a direct result of the fraudulent deadline change.

When eventually I came across B&O’s evidence I complained to Russell and wrote to the Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology, to whom both Russell and Professor Acton had given firm assurances of openness transparency and thoroughness. When questioned about my complaint by MPs in October 2010 Russell said,

“Yes, and you will see that Mr Holland’s recent comments do acknowledge that in fact Briffa and colleagues saw his submission and commented on it. So we have quite extensive paperwork, and I think it is reproduced in the evidence on the website, that shows Mr Holland’s submission being taken very carefully into account in responses and, I can assure you, being very fully discussed by us before we produced the material that is in the second half of chapter 9.”

From Russell’s comments and Boulton’s letter to Briffa you could be forgiven for believing, as I did, that it was B&O who selectively edited my submission to something for which they could fabricate a plausible rebuttal. So I asked UEA who had actually seen my submission – and for a copy of Boulton’s annex.

To my surprise Boulton’s annex, at http://tinyurl.com/3vso3ck, had even fewer of the characters from my original submission, having omitted all paragraph numbers and references. Yet UEA claimed that no one at UEA had seen my submission. The impossibility of B&O putting back paragraph numbers and breaks as well references without seeing the original was lampooned at the Bishop Hill blog. Proving how well read these blogs are, UEA quickly corrected themselves with a remarkable statement which as good as states that they deliberately intended to to put into the public record a document that suggested my submission had been considered whereas they knew, full well, only selected bits. At http://tinyurl.com/5uet222, UEA wrote,

“While the University itself did not receive a copy of your submission from Muir Russell, Professor Keith Briffa acquired a full copy of your submission by way of a request made to you by a third party.

The submission of Professor Briffa and Dr. Osborn in response to the letter and annex from Prof. Boulton was drafted specifically to deal only with those issues that were put to them by Prof. Boulton. In providing their response they showed the annex in a format that could be clearly linked to your submission to the Russell Review to explicitly demonstrate that your allegations had been formally considered.”

The final sting in the tail of this saga is that after a £300,000 enquiry into a University accused of deleting information to avoid the reach of freedom of information law, the Russell Review did just that. In July 2010 just days after its Report was published and before B&O’s evidence was noticed and long before Bolton’s annex was revealed, all the Review correspondence of Boulton and other members of the Review team held on the servers of the University of Edinburgh was deleted. Russell now refuses to release information that was formerly held subject to disclosure by the University under the FOISA and EISR.

Graham Stringer MP is right to say that the Russell Review is beyond parody.

You tweeted to James Delingpole about what happened with his press complaint went from the UEA.
I did tweet this back, but probably lost in twitter noise’

I wrote about James Delinpoles PCC win against UEA at the Award Winning Science blog,Watts Up With That,
In it I include a copy of the PCC ruling in full against UEA (rather embarrasing for UEA)

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/09/james-delingpole-beats-a-press-complaint-from-uea/

Professor Judith Curry, also wrote an article that may interest you at her blog CLimate Etc, about scientists and Univeristies ‘Lawering Up’. She mentions the Delingpole UEA press complaint. and chooses to end the article with a quote from me.

Prof J Curry:
“In closing, I repeat Barry Woods’ statement:

So hopefully now, before ‘climate scientists’ and politicians rush to the courts they will now think more carefully of the potential outcomes. If only because it may backfire on them and that they realise as he won the complaint, others in the media might pay MORE attention to the reason why he won the complaint.”

As an occasional blogger myself (sadly been neglecting it recently, in favour of twitter)

I also had this concern, which may be relevant to you as well, same article above:

“…How many blog owners or other journalists without the backing of an experienced legal team and the Telegraph would have been able to take this case on?

The threat of, or taking legal action against critics of ‘climate science’ does appear to be on the rise, this is a concern as few bloggers have any means to defend themselves legally. If actions like this are not fought and won, all perhaps it would take is a lawyer’s letter from a complainant with deep pockets (like UEA) for the blog owner to have to make a difficult personal and financial decision. Additionally, these actions may result in a form of self censorship with blogger and journalists not daring to comment.”

If you want James Delinpoles version of His ‘experience’ with the lawyers, PCC and UEA ! he writes it up in his own unique style here:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100083071/uea-the-sweet-smell-of-napalm-in-the-morning/

UEA seem to be very bad at PR, ie his win, and their complaint about 1 sentence, has just given more adverse publicity to UEA and made more people aware of their failings.. .. and perhaps begin to realise all is not well in one small but highly politicised area of climate science.