What are your thoughts on CRU getting 2 Freedom of Information Act requests per day?

Question

Really the only significant thing to come out of the stolen CRU emails were Phil Jones' comments about circumventing the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Which certainly would have been unacceptable behavior.

However, it has recently been revealed that at the time, CRU was being flooded with these requests.

"Last year in July alone the unit received 60 FoI requests from across the world. With a staff of only 13 to cope with them, the demands were accumulating faster than they could be dealt with. “According to the rules,” says Jones, “you have to do 18 hours’ work on each one before you’re allowed to turn it down.” It meant that the scientists would have had a lot of their time diverted from research.

A further irritation was that most of the data was available online, making the FoI requests, in Jones’s view, needless and a vexatious waste of his time. In the circumstances, he says, he thought it reasonable to refer the applicants to the website of the Historical Climatology Network in the US."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7017905.ece

Other climate scientists have had similar experiences, being flooded with FOIA requests for publicly available data, unnecessary emails, and other information. These requests have been characterized as "fishing expeditions for potentially embarrassing content but they are not FoIA requests for scientific information.”
http://climatesight.org/2010/03/07/freedom-of-information/

What are your thoughts on CRU getting 2 Freedom of Information Act requests per day, having to spend 18 hours dealing with each, with a staff of just 13 people? Does this change your mind about Phil Jones' private email comments?

Answer 1

I more or less understood that just from actually reading the e-mails instead of the out-of-context quotes. It's pretty obvious that they were being systematically harassed and it's obvious that it was an abuse of the FOI act.



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Answer 2

Once again, Dana, you miss the whole point. The objective was not to get more information about the data and how they were being handled, but to find grounds for raising questions so that the likes of some people here can turn round and say "Aren't you aware that serious questions have been asked...?" With hindsight, this whole thing could have been handled better but that is only from a PR point of view. There are not, and never were, any problems with the science and, as the report points out very clearly, the shortcomings in the behaviour of the researchers, while real, posed only a relatively minor inconvenience to serious scientific colleagues or critics. So I see no reason whatsoever to expect the McIntires of this world the change their conduct. It is reprehensible now, and it was reprehensible then. The only place where Jones etc went wrong was in not realising that when you are dealing with reprehensible faultfinders, you have to avoid even the merest unwarranted appearance of being at fault. Now wouldn't it be *wonderful* if we could have a good read of all the e-mails that have passed between McIntyre, Watts, and their sponsors?

Answer 3

18 hours of work at $500 per hour = $9000. This rate includes the time for the scientist and all of the usual overheads. The people making the requests should be prepared to pay for the time spent servicing their request. CRU should outsource servicing the requests to contractors (possibly retired climate scientists looking for a bit of work on the side) so that their 13 staff can spend their time doing science. If people really want the information and are too dumb or too lazy to walk into a library to read it in a peer reviewed journal, they deserve to pay $9000. The flood of requests looks a lot like obstruction and the people responsible should be sued for costs.

Answer 4

What kind of world would we live in, if anyone who found a law to be inconvenient to disobey it? They found a the FOIA law to be inconvenient? Tough luck.



Who else has an employer that allows them to disobey his boss? The FOIA were interfering with his work? Take up with the boss. If the boss in not sympathetic you either tough it up, or you quit. That is what the rest of world has to do.



But Jones had no problem releasing the data to his friends:



"Just sent loads of station data to Scott [Rutherford]. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites – you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs [McIntyre and McKittrick] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone."



The reason why these request were necessary was due to the fact, people could not replicate Jones's work.



"If I can find it (the computer code), it is likely to be hundreds of lines of uncommented fortran ! I recall the program did a lot more that just average the series. I know why he (McIntyre) can’t replicate the results early on – it is because there was a variance correction for fewer series."



Furthermore they were not inundated with FOIA requests. Firstly, when Jones made the famous quote about not wanting to release the data because he did not want people to find anything wrong with his work, there was no flurry or requests. He never stopped cooperating because of the request, he NEVER cooperated. Secondly, when there was a "flood" of requests it was a reaction to Jones being uncooperative. If he was cooperative, there never would have been this "flood" in the first place.

Answer 5

They needed an easier to navigate site with data easily available, and if it wasn't available, it should have said why (eg confidentiality agreements with the countries in question).





It appears there was an organised harassment campaign, and some of those involved are probably political AGW deniers. But some are probably genuinely interested in the truth and the culture of secrecy that climate scientists have adopted in response to the assaults on science and the lies by media and political hacks was the wrong thing to do IMO.

Answer 6

I guess the journalist is good at reconstructing the past in the image of his own wishful thinking.



'According to the rules' says Jones, but there is no such rule. Phil Jones is good at making up stories that have a hint of reality to try to maintain credibility.



If in the estimation of the relevant civil servant, an FOI request would take more than 18 hours, it can be rejected out of hand. They don't have to invest any more time than it takes to send a form letter which can be handled by a receptionist.



Just because Phil Jones likes to use the excuse 'we are declining to comply with your FOI request because it would take more than 18 working hours to do so' certainly doesn't mean anybody actually spent 18 hours on any requests.

Answer 7

Ha. 60 FOIs and only 13 people to do them??!! We get about 1600 a year and there are only 2 people on my team doing them.

Answer 8

An organised campaign of harassment.

I think it's very shabby tactics, as are the organised hate mail campaigns these scientists have to deal with daily. Let's hope it's just the death throes of the denial industry, not a forewarning of organised campaigns of violence against climate scientists, like those we have seen against family planning doctors in the U.S.

Answer 9

I just laid a hockey stick on some butcher paper and traced it.

Answer 10

A campaign of harassment.

Answer 11

If there is nothing toi hide then they have nothing to worry about so why all the complaining?