While I was a bit busy with other things (my PBS interview generated quite a lot of interest as well as hate mail) there was other news. Most notable was the ruling against ATI’s FOIA case with the University of Virginia. I don’t have any press release yet from ATI, but I’ll pass it along when it becomes available. Here’s a summary from ClimateScienceWatch, who seemed giddy at the news:
A Virginia court has affirmed the University of Virginia’s right to withhold confidential scholarly communications, thus ruling against the global warming denialist American Tradition Institute’s demand to make public climate scientist Michael Mann’s documents and email correspondence with dozens of other scientists during his time at UVa. This is an important victory in a case that threatened to send a chilling message to university scholars that they could no longer expect to engage in personal communications without having the whole world reading over their shoulders.
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prjindigo says:
September 18, 2012 at 5:12 am
Seriously, if you can’t keep work and play in separate e-mail addresses, you’ve already failed as a scientist.
Correct. And if , like M.Mann, you spend your taxpayer-funded working day bitching, bickering, and bull*****ing on Facebook or Twitter you should get the boot.
Statement from ATI on Bishop Hill:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2012/9/18/ati-statement-on-uva-foi-case.html
If Mann’s emails are even remotely as appalling as the “conversations” in the SkS secret forum dump, I can see why they are so desperate to avoid FOIA.
Has Mann filed his defamation lawsuit yet? There may be more than one way to do this.
I’ll provide a more chilling and restrictive environment- when govts provide monies for scientific research and select their recipients on the basis of political considerations. Isn’t it strange that
those groups that used to (and still do) insist upon the need for diversity, reject diversity when it means those not part of the herd happen to oppose their cherished beliefs.
Now, can anyone name a single scientific discipline whose subject matter is thoroughly understood and can be considered “settled,” with no issues in doubt? I can’t think of a single one : not astronomy, not physics, certainly none of the social sciences, which haven’t even achieved a
reliable level of categorization of their subject matter.
I can’t possibly be the only one to have posted a comment on ClimateScienceWatch?
“One Response to Court rules for Univ. of Virginia and Michael Mann against denialist inquisition – scholarly e-mail and documents are protected communication”
The mod must be deleting everything?
The chilling message that the whole world would look over their shoulders. Welcome to my world in big Pharma. I have no protection. All my work is always available to any agency such as FDA for inspection. If a product is on a legal hold then every communication is locked down and available for legal purposes. It’s against the law to delete any email under legal hold. I’m glad scientists can sneak around without worry anyone will indpect their world and yet we all just need to believe them at their word. Nice.
Good.
“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” – Cardinal De Richelieu
I use to work for a local fire department. We were not allowed to delete any emails and keep a record of all correspondence done in the name of the department. If there was ever a request for any said documents, we were expected to produce them quickly and without question! That is the way it should be when one is paid by the tax payer.
If the University and Mann want to keep their correspondence private, then do not accept any money from the tax payers. As tax payers, we should refuse to grant them any funds until they stop keeping work secrets from those who fund their work.
You should consider creating a post on that hate mail. Put their nastiest stuff up for display for all to see just how nice these people really are. Should make for interesting reading.
In my opinion, Chris Horner is nothing but a professional harasser operating under an umbrella of vested interest front organizations. He has no interest in truth seeking; it’s all about muck mining for anything spin-able. Unseemly. Good decision.
So will the harassment of Dr Mann continue? Climate science is surely the most scrutinised area of science now. Aren’t you skeptics just harassing him because you don’t like his message?
Subject to appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court.
It’s interesting how DeSmog Blog and other such outlets have chosen not to mention that. I had to go to the Washington Post story to verify it.
Has anything further come out about Michael Mann being offered a new professorship at UVA, which offer was then abruptly withdrawn? In the hullabaloo over the firing and reinstatement of UVA’s President, that little detail seems to have gotten lost.
John Brookes says:September 18, 2012 at 8:15 am Aren’t you skeptics just harassing him because you don’t like his message?
No, I don’t like his lies and phoney science.
John@EF says:
September 18, 2012 at 8:10 am
John Brookes says:
September 18, 2012 at 8:15 am
Here come the faithfull.
John Brookes, it isn’t so much that we don’t like his message as much as we don’t believe it without the underlying data. Mann has an agenda and his agenda is “everyone must believe blindly” because he is better/more educated than us. There are two parts to reality. One is, the public likes to make an educated decision without being spoon fed BS. The other is, he isn’t better than anyone else.
What we have here is an example of one of the big problem that plagues America. What we are seeing is that money buys lawyers, who if really cleaver, can delay a case through the court system without a decision being reached. With enough money, the decision can be delayed until the other side runs out of money.
The big assumption here is that the Supremes will agree to hear the appeal. You can Google it, but only about 2% of the petitions that go before SCOTUS are accepted or otherwise acted upon. If you aren’t a lucky lottery winner, the lower court ruling becomes (or affirms) precedent. The judge didn’t do the public any favors by his ruling.
Chances that the Supreme Court will issue a writ of certiorari are slim to none, and Slim left town.
In the Commonwealth of Virginia, a citizen’s right to make requests for
information from Virginia and its political subdivisions and their employees is
enshrined in a series of laws, passed by thier elected representatives, signed by their
Governor, and is now being interpreted, instance by instance, by their court system.
See:
http://198.246.135.1/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?000+cod+2.2-3700
for the sequence of Virginia FOI laws.
Remember, this case is based on Virginia law, applied to a Virginia institution (UVa)
concering work done on instititutional equipment by a former employee (Dr. Mann) .
This recent ruling comes from a Virginia court dealing with Virginia law.
It will be appealed (probably) to a Virginia appeals court based on assignments of
error having been made by this judge in his interprtation/application of
Virginia law.
Richard Courtney,
Quite right, but in fact I think the judge has done more than that if ATI’s recent release is an accurate account of what happened. He dismissed First Amendment and academic freedom arguments, accepted ATI’s arguments that FOI applies, apparently dismissed out of hand Mann’s intervention essentially calling it a nuisance, and sent the parties to appeal based on the interpretation of the statutory word “proprietory” and the breadth of the relevant FOI exemption.
It only needs the appeal to disagree with that intepretation or draw a more narrow view of the extent of that FOI exemption and the decision is turned on its head.
@ur momisugly D. J Hawkins,
The next step is th VIRGINIA Supreme Court.
D. J. Hawkins:
Sincere thanks for your message addressed to me at September 18, 2012 at 8:58 am.
Please note that I am not an American so my only view is the transcript of the hearing. When that transcript appeared in April nobody made your point that says
Indeed, on April 17, 2012 WUWT copied an article from the NYT by Tom Jackman. The WUWT thread is headed “Prince William climate case judge already anticipating the appeal”.
The article and the thread did not mention your point.
So, from a basis of my genuine ignorance of the fact, I would welcome confirmation of your statement that it is a “lottery” whether the case can go to Appeal. It does seem to have great importance.
Richard
Apologies for being off topic. But can anyone give me advice on embedding images into the body of articles submitted to WUWT. Also, embedding hyperlinks into article text.
[Reply: You must be a moderator to embed images. But you can cut and paste the image address, and readers can click on the URL to view it. — mod.]
The most recent issue of the UVA alumni monthly magazine devoted most of its pages to the dismissal and reinstatement affair of Dr. Teresa Sullivan as University President. The recurring assertion/speculation as to the justification for the dismissal was the U’s budget. Yet, there was not one mention or even a hint in all that ink that spending $100Ks on dodging the FOIA request was a factor, despite such a sum being non-trivial to that budget. The sum will only increase to answer appeals.