Guest post by Christopher Horner, CEI.
Today, NOAA finally delivered thousands of pages (hard copy, oddly, despite our request for electronic copies) of additional records that had been withheld during the deliberations over what to produce for a thorough FOIA seeking records relating to the HS, Mann’s appointment, Menne/surface stations, M&M, Climategate and the like.
This is a request from two years ago that has produced thousands of pages of papers and emails (all of the good stuff among which, in an odd coincidence, having already been produced under Climategate) and was the last in a series of four requests in response to which NOAA claimed ‘no responsive records’, when actually referring to records which they possessed but which Susan Solomon had said were really IPCC records and therefore not agency records. The subsequent IG investigation uncovering this response given to others, which we challenged when given to us, affirmed that this claim was not appropriate.
After congressional interest was expressed, NOAA offered differing defenses to us and Congress, what with Congress being subject to certain arguments against release which are not applicable to FOIA (eg seeking to protect the integrity of the scientific review process…), and we being subject to certain FOIA arguments to which Congress is not vulnerable (pre-decisional and the like).
The cover letter and inventory of withheld records, which counsel has been working on for a year, is attached. I have yet to review it in detail; I also will go over the records this week. A very superficial pawing through of the records indicates they’re mostly “IPCC” docs (there are also some emails…remember, these are the docs over which NOAA’s counsel and review panel have been fighting for more than a year, over whether to redact or withhold), and makes one wonder what they were so insistent about. But, as they fought like the devil to keep these secret, there — as the old joke has it — must be a pony in there somewhere.
Here is the cover letter:
CEI_NOAA_Solomon_Memo_and_Withholdings-1 (PDF)
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Not just a pony, but perhaps a huge steaming pile of what comes out of a pony…
Glynn, you get the Gold Star next to your name today.
by Christopher Horner, CEI
Today, NOAA finally delivered thousands of pages (hard copy, oddly, despite our request for electronic copies)
__________________________
Possible reasons:
a) They think that it will be harder to search and collate information in hard copy
b) It costs more this way and if they don’t spend it, they lose it
c) They can’t figure out how to make data available in electronic format
d) They only did it this way to aggravate you
e) All of the above
2 rears? Was this NOAA’s version of the rapid response team?
Is there a plan to scan these and get them online somewhere. If you get lots of eyes looking through the documents then the pony won’t have a place to hide.
Why would any government employee group refuse to release tax-funded data, if it was not of national strategic importance, unless they were trying to hide something?
Probably the reason why it took them so long, the printing of all those documents.
And i bet they shuffled the pile.
I wonder how complete these files really are. The hard copy certainly comes with an idea in mind. It takes far longer to search through printed paper than through a digital version of the same.
Looking forward to the forensic exam of the compost pile. It’s in there somewhere.
AAA
According to the cover letter, 1978 docs are in electronic form and 365 hard copy. Hundreds of others have not been released due to various FOIA exemptions that are allowed. Some seem reasonable (published studies behind a paywall) but 126 docs have been withheld because they contained personal emails or phone #s. Seem like they could have redacted the personal stuff rather then withhold the entire docs.
I wonder about attachments.
Would be useful to request a response as to why the documents were’t provided as requested,in their native electronic format. Of course,the answer is obvious,to make it difficult to search on key words. Typical Obama government transparency,not.
How much could be ‘Faked’ in 2 years?
I read at Electronic Frontier Foundation EFF.org. When security agencies tried to choke the review process with thousands of pages of FOIA response then the EFF recruited thousands of volunteers to read and comment from their particular special knowledge.
https://www.eff.org/issues/foia
Running OCR on the document using Acrobat Professional can convert the pdf linked in the post to a searchable document.
Congratulations! I am looking forward to the discovery of at least one needle in this haystack. However I wonder how much of it has been faked up by the fake-up team at NOAA. These guys are on standby 24/7 to produce corrupt data.
If these are posted online, we could crowdsource them…
Also included, according to the postscript in the covering letter, are 8 DVDs, 7 of which contain movies, the eighth containing some 2000 documents.
I have a problem with the fact that certain emails are going to be withheld due to personal information being in those emails. Surely FOIA could have released those emails with personal details ie: phone numbers blocked out ? The pony may be in one of those 126 emails that have been exempted from release.
Does everyone really believe they are being forthcoming in providing everything that might be relevant? Personally, I doubt it. They fought hard knowing they could release BS. I don’t “believe” NOAA for a minute. I think it’s a corrupt agency that should be disbanded. Let trhe private sector provide weather information.
Did they release anything that was not already public (IPCC, Climategate, web data, etc)? Seems it would take a couple of years to sort that out. How would you ever know if what they sent is the whole? And what about the “always upward since 1940” adjustments totally about +0.6°C?
Why in God’s name would NOAA need to ever have a FOIA request made for anything it does? Even if this was “IPCC” data, the fact that they were warehousing it and possibly referencing it in and of itself should have been sufficient for a data request to be honored. I’m completely baffled by this. I’m not naive, it just stinks to high heaven that a tax payer funded entity would have say whatsoever in a request for data that is publicly funded.
All of this data should in fact be stored on publicly accessible servers so none of this would ever become an issue. This isn’t a public employees data or even a public agencies- it’s the taxpayers.
We all owe Chris Horner a debt of gratitude for his dogged persistence in the face of official intransigence and resistance to openness. I hope something of interest shows up in the tranche of released information. If Chris still has the determination, a further request for copies of the relevant documents with names/phone numbers redacted seems reasonable.
The very same Warmistas constantly shrieking about how little time we have left to save the Earth, about how urgent it is to get on with their program of universal poverty, are of course the very same who take endless years of excuses before they finally release any of their shoddy work, and only under duress at that, Congressional in this case.