Press Release from FME Law
July 3, 2018
Arizona Appellate Court Decides Hockey Stick Emails Must Be Released Despite the University’s Appeal.
One thousand seven hundred and sixty-three days ago, on behalf of its client, the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic, PLLC (FME Law) asked the University of Arizona to hand over public records that would expose to the world the genesis of what some consider the most influential scientific publication of that decade – the Mann-Bradley-Hughes temperature reconstruction that looks like a hockey stick.
The University refused.
On February 26th of this year, and after submissions of legal briefings that now fill two banker’s boxes, and three trips to the Appellate Court, the trial court ordered release of the documents, giving the University 90 days to disclose the documents in a word-searchable form. Three days before the deadline, the University filed a motion asking the trial court to “stay” the disclosure of the public records while they appealed the case. In a 13 word decision, the trial court found “the requested relief is not warranted.”
The University then asked the Appellate Court for a stay, arguing that once the documents were released, “that genie could not be put back in the bottle,” in the event the trial court’s decision was reversed.
Yesterday, a mere six days after filing of the final legal brief on the motion for a stay, the Appellate Court issued a seven-word decision:
“Motion for Stay Pending Appeal is DENIED.”
The Appellate Court gave no explanation as to why it denied its motion, but it would likely be one of the reasons offered by FME Law in its brief to the court. A Copy of that brief is attached to this news release. Among other things, this order means the Appellate Court could not conclude that the University would have probable success on the merits of their argument. Nor could they conclude there were “serious questions” remaining to be addressed.
“This decision by the Appellate Court is much more than a small procedural action,” said Dr. David Schnare, the member-manager of the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic, PLLC, who is prosecuting this case. “We asked for the full history of the hockey stick graph and much more. We sought the history of the fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report and the discussions among the scientists as they discussed climate papers and the then burgeoning antagonism between climate scientists not of like mind.” Chaim Mandelbaum, Executive Director of FME Law explains, “This case is not over, but we appear to be at the beginning of the end.”
The University may wish to now appeal to the Arizona Supreme Court for a stay, an effort attorneys familiar with the case believe would not change the outcome. “This decision does not end the appeal, however,” Mr. Mandelbaum stated.
Dr. Schnare described the status of this case and its importance. “We did not take this case only to obtain the history of a very controversial period of time in the climate wars. We also took this case to cast sunlight on how public universities work, how they contribute to the formation of public policy, and how professors behave within the policy arena. Core legal issues remain before the court – particularly about how to protect the research process while still allowing the public to learn how this sector of the government works. The University’s appellate brief is due on July 30th, our answering brief is due on September 7th and any reply from the University comes after that. We won’t have a final appeals court decision on the merits of this case until late in the year, and then it will be on to the Arizona Supreme Court.”
In the meantime, the documents will have to be handed over. Dr. Schnare and his staff will take the first look at those documents. With a doctorate in environmental management and decades of experience in policy formation, he, with the assistance of FME Law staff, will sort these documents, organize them for use by the public and prepare a report on what they contain – so to speak, a chronical of that historic time, based not on cherry picked emails but on the full history as available in the public record. They will then turn over the public records and their report to their client who is expected to make them available to the public.
FME Law is a 501(c)(3) public charity dedicated to be an honest, pro-environmental legal presence that represents clients seeking to hold state and federal governments to the ethical and legal requirements that protect and enhance free market environmentalism. For further information, Contact Chaim Mandelbaum (703) 577-9973, Executive Director of FME Law; or, Dr. Schnare (571) 243-7975, Member-Manager of FME Law, PLLC.
PDF Attachment: PR and court decision: FME Law Press Release July 3, 2018
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For those contributors who may have missed them
there are several really excellent and well written discussions on both
the hockey Stick and the Yamal Tree Rings of Briffa on the
Bishop Hill Blog,
http://www.bishop-hill.net/the-yamal-deception
These add exceptional depth to understanding of what took place, and how it was done.
There used to be free versions around, then they became “books” and there now appears to be a charge.
I wonder how many of the electronic documents will be eaten by a proverbial “computer bug”? I have zero faith in these administrators not to continue to hide the truth. Oh, or the copies will be corrupt… Or they deleted those YEARS ago… They will try something.
The NSA has them.
all of them ?
Let me guess…they just discovered the dog ate their server? Or a passing Russian hooded crow walked on somebody’s keyboard causing all the relevant emails to be deleted?
Maybe they got hold of the cloth that Hillary used to wipe her server?
I could have saved the Planet trillions of dollars by getting a highly trained spider with a different coloured ink on each leg and let is run across a page.
One can only be amused by threads involving Michael Mann. In almost every one, trolls not active in any other threads suddenly appear to muddy the waters. They want to know how the emails show fraud, or intent, or at the mention of what would happen if similar strategies were used in the private sector, demand to know when that has ever happened. Look at the first few comments in this thread for example, with trolls diverting attention from obvious conclusions by polluting the thread with arguments so stupid that Dave Middleton is reduced to asking the trolls if they can read. Lots of scrolling to get to any coherent discussion of facts and events.
Well I’d like to thank the trolls. They are, frankly, evidence that a well funded campaign to distract attention from what Mann and Co did is real and in operation. No, I’m no conspiracy theorist. But this behaviour in Mann related threads has gotten both old and repetitive. No other climate scientist that I am aware of gets defended in this manner in this forum, and I’ve been following it for a long time.
Yes indeed David I too have been watching much the same patterns of behaviour evolving over the years. Every time this subject comes up in forums across the internet I see a tribe of creationist-like people show up with the same bizarre arguments about how is it possible to know what was in the minds of the Climategaters when they wrote what they did and attempting to change the meaning and context of plain English.
This dedicated band of misanthropes are the active wing of the quasi-religious cult of carbon dioxide and they will never stop. They may be utterly irrelevant but they will never stop and moreover they form a significant part of the body of evidence supporting the hypothesis that what we are dealing with here is a virulent cult which has nothing whatsoever to do with scientific enquiry or the search for truth.
Maybe one of the lawyers that are conversant with document production can answer this.
How would the court know if UA turned over the “Mildly embarrassing but we can deal with it” emails.
But deleted the “We know AGW is a crock but we are still going to push it” emails?
That would be extremely difficult to accomplish. These emails are a tangled mess of email lists, replies, reply alls, forwards, bcc’s and on an on. You can’t delete one single email without also deleting all the various emails associated with it. If you did, giant gaps would exist in the records that are easy to spot and raise questions. Imagine a damning email that has been sent to six people, all of whom hit reply all, three of which forwarded it to other people, and then all of those recipients hit reply all and/or forward it. Each step in that expanding chain would have the original damning content embedded in the email string. Not saying it is impossible, but it would take a LOT of work, and if even ONE email chain has a hole in it, it will draw the attention of investigators, essentially telling them exactly where to look and point it out in court. The perpetrators at that point would be looking at jail time if the court got nasty about it. Further, even if you did accomplish the task of killing all those webs of email chatter, you’d be exposed by the simple fact that if even one recipient came forward and said hey, I’ve got this email from Michael Mann I was cc’d on and it isn’t in the list provided to the court, the jig would be up. Then on top of that, you most likely have the search being done by qualified IT professionals who will not only have to go through the email server itself, but also through backup copies of the data that are taken on daily and weekly basis and stored off site. So to make all the incriminating emails disappear, you’d need not only the silence of all the people who exchanged email with Mann, but also the IT department, who also aren’t interested in going to jail. All you need is one whistle blower.
Not saying it can’t be done. The IRS under the last administration made a whole whack of email disappear. I attribute that to weak investigative journalism because anyone with any knowledge of enterprise email systems knew that the excuses given were bullsh*t. In this case a court is demanding the emails, and it is not a friendly court at this point. If the university thought they could make the emails quietly disappear, they most likely would have instead of getting into a drawn out legal battle. My guess is they fought because making the emails disappear is a real problem for them.
But at day’s end, who knows what stupid excuse they might come up with and the court will accept. I just think its a pretty tall order to just make a few incriminating email disappear without leaving some obvious holes in the record.
In fact, they may double down. They’ll produce massive amounts of email that are technically responsive to the request but have nothing to do with anything. They’ll try and drown everyone with volume, the incriminating emails buried in the mess. Plus, they’l be pulling up obscure emails and trying to muddy the waters. Yes he said X over here, but if you look at Y over there, he was really responding to Z and so X doesn’t actually mean X. Just look at the top of this thread where trolls defending Mann have so twisted the conversation that Middleton wound up asking them if they could read. The trolls won. They muddied the waters and only dedicated readers are going to read far enough down in the comments to get past their drivel and see what anyone else has to say.
Hanlon’s razor – Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
That’s why the response has to be in word-searchable format.
The bald fact that these jokers are so desperate to hide what are supposed to be professional exchanges between people who are supposed to be professional scientists tells you absolutely everything you need to know about the total absence of integrity of the supposed scientists and the politically motivated institution(s) which harbours their nefarious activity. We must never, ever stop the fight to bring these disgusting people down.
the discussions are interesting
what i personally see as so wrong is that IF they were 100% above board and sure of their work being correct and if it was pal errr peer reviewed?
then publishing it years ago would have saved them and all of us a lot of grief time n funding..
the ongoing attempts to block its release and the really weird claim re the genie n the bottle IF anyone gets to see it??
makes it stink like a rotting whale carcass on a summers day!
the emails pretty much show it was all bluff n bullsh*t anyway
“Motion for Stay Pending Appeal is DENIED.”
How appropriate! 🙂
Data can be spliced optically as well as numerically. From what I read there is an attempt to use weasel words to say that only numerical splicing is splicing and that optical splicing is not splicing.
Optical splicing is splicing when it attempts to make two things appear as one thing. When tree rings and thermometers are both graphed together as temperature that is an optical splice. Coloring a house blue on the left and red on the right does not make it two houses to the eye.
ferdberple,
You say,
“Data can be spliced optically as well as numerically. From what I read there is an attempt to use weasel words to say that only numerical splicing is splicing and that optical splicing is not splicing.”
If that difference were true then it would not matter because Mann et al. did both to fabricate the ‘hockeystick’ graph..
This thread is about David Middleton saying theMann et al. ‘hockeystick’ graph results from “the practice of splicing a high frequency signal onto the end of a a low frequency signal and calling it an anomaly”.
In other words, the graph shows ‘apples’ (i.e.low frequency signal) and oranges’ (i.e.high frequency signal) spliced together, and the graph’s caption says the plot of ‘apples’ is “updated”with the plot of ‘oranges.
Climategate revealed that Mann’s response to my pointing that out was to lie by saying,
“Our method, as you know, doesn’t include any “splicing of two different datasets”-
see https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/12/a-mann-uva-email-not-discussed-here-before-claims-by-mann-spliced-and-diced/
Subsequently McIntire and McKittrick determined that Mann et al. had misused statistical methods to also splice the actual data sets.
Richard
I have posted several messages in this thread and most obtained a number of positive votes.
I notice that all except one of them has vanished.
I would be grateful for an explanation of how and why my posts have been deleted from this thread.
Richard
(A FAKE Ralph David Westfall was posting comments, he is being removed from the thread) MOD
(Really sorry that your many fine comments were removed because they were in reply to a bogus R. D. Westfall. it was a fine effort on your part) MOD
And I wasted some of my best insults on that impostor… LOL!
Save up the insults, David. This jerk or another member of his clan will be here another day.
Signed: /The real Ralph Dave Westfall/
Thank you MOD for pulling all the stuff posted under my name by this fraud. It’s sad that people have to stoop this low to promote their agenda, but it’s not surprising.
MOD,
Thankyou for the explanation.
I wish I had known about the fake because there are reasons why posting is an effort for me. I thought my effort was worth it to stop those seeking knowledge from being misled by the person I now know was a fake.
Again, thanks.
Richard
I just saved one of your comments, worth to be remembered. Thanks for your efforts to give us the right information!
Just wanted to say hello Mr. Courtney. Nice to see you posting, and you will be glad to know I read your posts before they were deleted. All the best to you, sir.
DB
“‘We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”
–Phil Jones
Well, Dr. (probably should be stripped of this title) or Mr Jones either your data stands up to rigorous scrutiny by the real scientific community or you are a fraud. No scientist worth their salt should fear examination of data if they have confidence in their research. His statement is proof in itself of the liars they are.
Well, from an outsider’s perspective, whatever’s in the emails must be pretty damning to the University, the Mann team, and global warming theory for the U of A to put up that big of a fight. They should also release the names of all the groups and individuals who were helping fund the U of A’s legal battle.