Via email I’m getting reports that the American Tradition Institute has a CD ROM of the Mann University of Virginia emails in hand and are evaluating them.
They are in a 4.3 Megabyte file consisting of 3,827 pages.
Given the suspicious timing of the recent Mann “vindication” report (PDF) from an investigation by the National Science Foundation, I think the effort will be likely to be focused on “what wasn’t released”. Clearly there’s some PR game playing going on with timing to get a “vindication” press release out before anyone in the public has a chance to look at the emails.
ATI promises a press release later today once they have a better handle on the email release.
Given all the roadblocks that have been thrown in front of this FOIA request, IMHO. I expect them to be selected, sanitized, and possibly full of redactions. We’ll know soon.
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If I recall the court order correctly, U of V must release all the emails to ATI’s lawyers — including all that U of V’s lawyers consider outside the scope of the FOI request. (Pretty much all of them, more or less) ATI’s lawyers then go before the judge and start arguing about why they should be subject to the FOI request. Eventually the lawyers will tell ATI what they can tell us. Until then it is lawyers eyes only.
Obviously a “Best Of” compilation. Michael Mann at his most polite.
My money’s on Cuccinelli.
Vindication from accusations of fraud, or misappropriation of funds or falsifying data are not the same as vindicating his scientific methods or conclusions.
John Whitman: “I question what it is that the CD ROM discussed in the lead post is supposed to contain. Is it the UVa info that was never considered to be subject to FOI exemptions? Or is it UVa info that is the result of the ‘in camera’ review and a court final decision that the info isn’t exempt from FOI (as UVa claimed)?”
It seems likely that this release is merely the uncontested portion of UVa’s holdings (“Disclosed Information”). According to their agreement (see http://www.atinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ATI-v-UVA-5-24-Protective-Order.pdf ), UVa may supply the information which they believe to be exempt from FOI (“Exempt Information”) up to 30 days later. At that point, ATI will have 90 days in which to review the documents in camera and object to any such exemptions.
Cart before Horse???
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/08/24/case-closed-climategate-was-manufactured/
I’m sorry, but for a FUNDING AGENCY to make this statement, they’ve lost all credibility with me. The investigation should have been conducted by an outside, independent organization.
Its actually pretty difficult to sanitise a set of emails – the fingerprints of the emails you remove are left all over the emails you keep in – e.g. references to “that mail you sent last week”, that kind of thing. Very difficult to catch it all with software.
—————
HaroldW,
Thank you for your comment.
Yes, it makes sense that the CD ROM mentioned in WUWT’s lead post is the uncontested UVa info; that is the UVa info that is not subject to claims of exemption from FOI. It make sense that it is not the contested ‘exempt from FOI’ info that will eventually go through ‘in camera’ review and then a court decision of being releasable.
John
“Clearly there’s some PR game playing going on with timing to get a “vindication” press release out before anyone in the public has a chance to look at the emails. ”
What about the suspicious timing of this WUWT post, which has waited long enough to hide the inconvenient NSF investigation results behind promises about what the “ATI emails” will show.
What’s the spin plan when the ATI emails don’t yield anything? You are fast running out of rope to hang Mann by.
onion2,
Oh these emails won’t yield anything. The incriminating emails are the ones Mann and UVA withheld.
Where’s Wikileaks when you need ’em?
There contents do not matter the damage was done through the effort the university put into not releases them in the first place but fighting tooth and nail to keep them from public view, especially as they were more then happy to had another persons e-mails over the Greenpeace when they came calling . Who now would believe there not holding stuff back ?
All the vindications will end up working against the warmists if any incriminating emails are found. The cover up is always worse.
Fred N. says:
August 24, 2011 at 11:10 am
So were the Climategate Emails. A pity, some of the attachments would have been interesting. No, they weren’t in another directory.
Looking closer:
mail$ cat *.txt | wc
170905 1136523 8013556
That’s 171K lines. At 50 lines per page, 3420 pages.
1M words, 8M characters.
Comparable. Each Email probably starts on a new page.
Oh –
mail$ ls | wc
1073 1073 16095
1K Emails.
Mann Bearpig says:
August 24, 2011 at 11:13 am
4.3 MEGABYTES ?
Last time I checked my email folder there was about 6 GB of emails in there.. Obviously Mann does not get many emails. If each one is avg 10 kb then there are about 440 emails in that file … Not many for such a busy person.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Ah yes, and 10 kb is 10,240 bytes, and each ASCII character is one byte, making your grossly incorrect estimate of only 440 emails, each, on average, 10,240 characters in length.
That Mann & Co. must surely be a wordy nerds.
Only 440 emails? ROTFLMFAO!
This is a test to see what might be happening to my posts.
Hey, Anthony, have I been banned? Was it because I made jokes about you – in a thread full of jokes about Mann?
{Don’t know. Several repeated posts got dumped (automatically) in the spam folder by the filter, but they are not marked as “Spam” themselves over there. All should be readable. Must be a Mann-made error. Robt]
Yeah – clearly there is a massive plot.
BTW – does anyone know how many people working at the ATI or the NSF might be involved? I was just wondering how big this plot is.
Joshua,
I think conspiracies only involve Big Oil.
To onion2:
Suppose you are the prosecution in a high profile trial. If the jury is full of friends of the defendant and if the judge stands to profit from the defendant being innocent, do you really think there will be a fair trial? All the so-called exonerations are nothing more than a red herring. The investigations are just like the science of man-made global warming: they already have the result they wanted before anything began.
The paranoia is strong with this one!
Thanks, Robt. I couldn’t live another day if I had been banned.
Thanks Robt.
Would have been tough to face going forward in life if I had been banned.
Sorry for the double-post.
I wasn’t returned to the “awaiting moderation” screen like in the past; after my 8:57 post I was returned to the top of the post (as I had when my posts didn’t go through).
Weird.
First thought: I agree…
Ken Harvey says:
August 24, 2011 at 12:23 pm
My money’s on Cuccinelli.
Second thought: it depends on the judge. There will be alot of legal back and forth here.
Third thought: I wonder how good Cuccinelli’s communication skills are. This is a classic case of obscured communication coupled with an attempt to buy a publicly adopted result that is not supported by the facts. If Cuccinelli is skilled, he can find the facts, or the obscuration of the facts and head that off. This is legal theater. This is why he filed.
Fourth thought: See first thought. Ken Harvey is right.