The University of Virginia has joined a list of institutions claiming that there has been an actual inquiry into and “exoneration” of scientists exposed by the November 2009 Climategate leak. At the same time, however, the university’s actions make a mockery of the idea.
U.Va.’s Aug. 23 release under court order of 3,827 pages of emails, records which the university previously denied existed, was its second since the American Tradition Institute sought judicial assistance in bringing the school into compliance with the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.
The school has spent approximately $500,000 to date keeping these records from the taxpayer, who paid for their production to begin with.
The university once again labored to avoid releasing correspondence directly addressing the now discredited climate-change “hockey stick” graph purporting to show a record of sharply rising atmospheric temperatures allegedly caused by human activities that produce carbon.
The hockey stick was produced while former assistant research professor Michael Mann worked at U.Va.
About 150 of the Climategate emails were sent to or from Mann at U.Va. and were central to the scandal, which exposed the now-disavowed temperature record, the hockey stick graph and related activities by scientists seeking to keep dissenting work from publication. The emails showed scientists circling the wagons to protect their claims, funding and careers.
As with other related Mann correspondence using a U.Va. address with third parties of which we are aware, each of these 150 or so Climategate emails is covered by our VFOIA request. Not one of them made it into U.Va.’s releases.
The university acknowledges withholding more than 3,000 more pages, which should include such records. This likely represents about five times the original number of U.Va. emails revealed in Climategate.
Even before ATI was able to review these emails, Mann described the release to Science Magazine, indicating a collaborative effort with U.Va. in what amounts to hiding from the taxpayer efforts to derail exposure of the hockey stick.
We certainly appreciate that he is worried. But no argument exists that these records belong to Mann. Further, the VFOIA protects the taxpayers’ interests first and only secondarily those of the university. Not protected are the actions of former faculty, which once revealed created a dense cloud of suspicion over their work.
These records are inarguably the property of U.Va. and therefore, barring a legitimate exemption under VFOIA, of Virginia taxpayers.
A useful example of complying with the Virginia Freedom of Information Act is George Mason University’s prompt turnover to the media of correspondence from professor Edward Wegman.
In one of life’s coincidences, these involved Wegman’s work exposing the dubious methods involved in creating the hockey stick.
Climategate emails sent or received by Mann’s U.Va. email address include certain now-notorious, often nasty missives, many of which are highly questionable from a legal or ethics perspective, and most reflecting wagon-circling by alarmists discussing how to defeat substantive challenge and even requests for transparency involving an already published paper.
It is reasonable to surmise that these are among the 9,000 pages U.Va. finally identified as responsive to ATI. If so, each of them is being withheld on the remarkable claim that they are “data, records or information of a proprietary nature produced or collected by or for faculty … in the conduct of or as a result of study or research on medical, scientific, technical or scholarly issues.” Really.
Excerpts of apparently scholarly research of commercial intent and value presumably include such Climategate gems as this:
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
Or another gleefully noting the death of a skeptic who had dared correspond with them.
This is the sort of top secret “proprietary” email that U.Va. will risk fortune, reputation and sanction to keep from releasing. A U.Va. official informed us on no less than three occasions that the school was, in effect, ignoring the law’s mandate to interpret exemptions narrowly. Clearly he wasn’t kidding.
But will the court will find this funny?
U.Va. prides itself on its honor code. Yet instead of acting forthrightly like its fellow ward of the taxpayer, George Mason University, U.Va. exacerbates the scandal and the increasingly warranted public distrust of Big Science, particularly “climate” science, an edifice built upon hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars annually and dedicated to keeping that gravy train rolling.
This matters for reasons beyond basic principles such as the taxpayers’ right to know how their resources are being used. The hockey stick and its ilk are cited as the basis for fundamentally restructuring our economy.
This cannot be attended by such trifling by a public institution with its transparency obligations under the law. That U.Va. has chosen to persist in a campaign diminishing its stature and credibility changes nothing under that law. The taxpayers have rights, and we are exercising them.
Christopher C. Horner is director of litigation for the American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center, which is suing the University of Virginia.
