Climate Audit

More news on Acton’s supposed “investigation” of the deletion of emails. New documents show that Acton did not even meet with Briffa or Jones in his supposed “investigation” of the deletion of emails. Acton sent Briffa a letter asking him whether he had “knowingly” deleted emails subject to FOI. Briffa wrote back that he hadn’t. That appears to be the entire extent of Acton’s “investigation”. Sort of like Penn State.

Also see Bishop Hill on this story here.
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In its refusal of David Holland’s FOI request for Muir Russell documents, the UEA has argued that it did not have a contract with Muir Russell; instead, Muir Russell was a “public appointment”. I did a blog post two years ago in which I raised questions about the veracity of UEA’s answer. The issue is at stake in David Holland’s tribunal hearing today. I have a few more thoughts on whether the UEA’s powers entitle it to make “public appointments”. Related to this is whether the UEA Vice Chancellor can unilaterally make “public appointments”.

The UEA refused Holland’s FOI 10-144 as follows:

The University does not consider that there was a contractual relationship with Sir Muir Russell or the inquiry team; it was by way of a public appointment (as is commonplace in these circumstances).

In its internal appeal, the UEA re-iterated this assertion, as it did in its refusal of Holland’s related 11-022. In its submission to the ICO in the appeal, the UEA maintained its claim that there was “no contractual relationship”.

Let’s step back for a moment and ponder precisely how (and whether) the UEA is empowered to make “public appointments”. In my earlier post, I reviewed some of the policies governing UK public appointments, but did not examine the charter of the UEA and the office of the Vice Chancellor, which I’ll do today.

Let’s start with a simple case. The Global Warming Policy Foundation contracted with Andrew Montford to write a report on the Climategate inquiries a couple of years ago. No one would argue that the Global Warming Policy Foundation had made a “public appointment” of Andrew Montford. The Global Warming Policy Foundation, for obvious reasons, has not chartered to make “public appointments”, though, like any other organization, it has the right to enter into contracts, as it did with Andrew Montford.

The question then is: how, in law, does the Vice Chancellor of the UEA have a right to make “public appointments” that is not possessed by, say, Benny Peiser of the GWPF?

The logical place to look is in the charter of the University of East Anglia. But the charter merely says that UEA has the powers of a “natural person”, “including but not limited to” various itemized powers, including the right to enter into contracts and the right to do things “necessary or convenient” to the furtherance of its objectives:

4. Powers of the University
4.1 Subject to the provisions of the Charter and Statutes, and in the furtherance of its objects, the University shall have all the powers of a natural person including, but not limited to, the power:
…
4.1.7 In relation to the transaction of University business:…
4.1.7.2 to enter into contracts;
…
4.1.9 to do anything else necessary or convenient, whether incidental to these powers or not, in order to further the objects of the University as a place of education, learning and research.

This last item (4.1.9) does not, as I read it, confer powers that are additional to the “natural person powers” conferred in section 4.1, but itemizes one of the powers of a “natural person”.

The term “natural person powers” has legal meaning. “Natural persons” are entitled to do a variety of things under common law, but they are not entitled to make “public appointments”. Only the Crown can make public appointments. Indeed, when one looks carefully at the list of public appointments covered in the UK Code of Practice for Public Appointments, the public appointments pertain to departments of the Crown. The “remit” of the Commissioner for Public Appointments specifies appointments made by “Ministers” of the Crown:

The Commissioner for Public Appointments regulates the processes by which Ministers (including Welsh Ministers) make appointments to the boards of certain public bodies and certain statutory offices in England and Wales.

The University of East Anglia is not a department of the Crown. It has been endowed by its charter only with the powers of a “natural person”; nowhere in its charter is it empowered to make “public appointments”. The Vice Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, regardless of his self-conceit, is not a Minister of the Crown and is not entitled to make “public appointments”. The UEA claim to the contrary is yet another fabrication.

And even if the University of East Anglia were empowered to make “public appointments” (which seems very dubious), could the Vice Chancellor personally make a “public appointment” without submitting the “public appointment” to the Council of the University? Seems highly implausible to me.

It seems incontrovertible to me that Vice Chancellor Acton is not empowered to make “public appointments”. And that UEA merely contracted with Muir Russell and the various members of the panel.

Arguments would still remain, but arguments based on the premise that Acton’s actions of 2-3 December 2009 constituted a “public appointment” process should be rejected by the Tribunal.

Tomorrow (15 January 2013), the Information Tribunal will hear David Holland’s appeal of the ICO decision (FER0387012 ) regarding the connection of the Muir Russell Review and UEA in respect to FOI legislation (see FOI correspondence here.) Both Muir Russell and UEA Vice Chancellor Acton are scheduled to appear.

The hearing is at Court Room 7, Field House, 15 Breams Building, London EC4A 1DZ and commences at 10:30. Acton is scheduled for 11-12:30. Muir Russell is scheduled for 1:30-3:00. Also scheduled to attend on behalf of UEA are Brian Summers and Jonathan Colam-French plus three attorneys from Mills and Reeves. Muir Russell is also anticipated to have his own counsel present. David Holland is representing himself.

David will have an extremely difficult time pinning down either Acton or Russell. The transcripts of the Science and Technology Committee show that both are prone to give lengthy and unresponsive answers, thereby running out the clock.

For example, Muir Russell was asked how they chose the three examples of peer review – which barely scratched the surface of the peer review controversy and included an incident with the editor of Energy and Environment that was not of the faintest interest in the major climate blogs or commentary. Muir Russell falsely said that the three incidents were “at the top of the head” when the story broke and then ran the clock with diversionary puff about Richard Horton.

Q104 Pamela Nash: This question is to Sir Muir. In your review you found no evidence to support that there was any subversion of the peer review process and you examined three specific instances. Could you tell us why those three instances were chosen?

Sir Muir Russell: They were the three that had been at the top of the head, as it were, in the comments that were made when the whole story broke. I keep going back to what I said to Mr Williams. They were the things which we thought, as we were looking at the issues, were solid and good examples to pick and to test the accusations that had been made. I know there are comments that say, “You could have found more. There could have been others.” They weren’t in the forefront at the time. If you look at the footnote in Montford, I think it is, about one of them, it says that it wasn’t actually clear what the allegation was, so one has to be balanced. We couldn’t do everything but we looked at three very solid accusations.

The Soon and Baliunas was one that came up all the time and we looked at that fairly thoroughly.

The editor of Energy and Environment had sent a lot of emails to me about what we would do. So it was important to check out that position.

Then there was the Cook stuff and there is quite an extensive explanation of what was actually going on there. I think you will find three quite detailed explanations based on information that we got about what was actually happening.

Then, of course, we did the important thing of getting Richard Horton to work on peer review for us. You will see from the record of the predecessor Committee that one of the things that had happened that was, let’s say, uncomfortable, because I was quite uncomfortable sitting here when being asked about it, was that Dr Campbell of Nature had to leave the group because he had been interviewed and had said there was nothing wrong with what CRU had done. That was a prejudicial thing about the inquiry. It had nothing to do with his views about climate science. It was prejudicial about the inquiry, and he very properly said, “I have to leave.” So we brought in Richard Horton, not as a full member in the sense of being on the team and looking at all the work that we had done, because it would have been very difficult to catch up on that, but we brought him in to give us advice on peer review. We peer reviewed that because we got Liz Wager of COPE to have a look at that as well. You will see all that in the report. So I think that setting that set of judgments against the facts of the cases as we found them was really quite a good and balanced way of getting a serious big picture about what these people had been doing in relation to peer review and also peer review more generally so there are specific answers and there are some general points to go forward with on peer review. I put my hand up and say, yes, there could well have been other cases that we might have looked at, but these were the ones that everybody seemed to think were at the top of their heads at the

Another kind of problem will be how to handle totally unresponsive answers, the unresponsiveness of which is clear in transcripts, but, unless you are a litigation lawyer, hard to pick up at the time. Consider the following from Acton to Stringer:

Q96 Graham Stringer: And you recorded those meetings with Professor Jones and his team?

Acton’s answer was completely unresponsive:

Professor Edward Acton: If you examine our website you will find that these statements have been there for some time.

A recent FOI from David Holland has revealed that the UEA claims not to have a copy of the full statements from Briffa or Jones given to Acton nor any information on whether the supposed statements were signed nor even information on the date of the supposed statements.

It will also be very hard for David to pin Acton down when he makes statements that cannot be corroborated and sometimes seem to come out of thin air. For example, Acton told the following to the Science and Technology Committee:

Can those e-mails be produced? Yes, they can. Did those who might have deleted them say they deleted them? No. They say they did not. I wanted to be absolutely sure of those two, and I have established that to my satisfaction.

However, at the time, the key emails from Wahl to Briffa could not produced.

David’s task tomorrow will be very difficult, but he’s done a remarkable job thus far against UEA obstruction and I wish him well tomorrow.

The actual issue of the relationship between the Russell review and the UEA is an interesting one.

CA reader Duke C has some results from his FOI request that look like they bear directly on my longstanding appeal for the Wahl attachments that the UEA purport to be unable to locate on the backup server. Read More »

David Holland’s recent FOI has yielded more unbelievable assertions from the University that inspired the Monty Python sketch on idiocy. The FOI request was directed at untrue evidence given to Parliament by UEA Vice Chancellor Acton in connection with the notorious deletion of emails by Briffa, Jones and associates.
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A recent David Holland FOI has turned up an astonishing new riddle about the relationship between UEA and the Muir Russell panel: there are two different versions of the Sommer Report on the Backup Server, both dated 17 May 2010 and both entitled “UEA – CRU Review: Initial Report and commentary on email examination”. One version was included in the Muir Russell archive of online evidence – see here – it was only two pages long. A different 10-page version was produced by UEA in response to David Holland’s FOI – see documentation or here as html. The longer version contains details not included in the (apparently) expurgated version published by Muir Russell. The short version is derived from the longer version. Although the two versions of the report are both said to have the same author and bear the same date, there are differences in formatting that, in my opinion, point strongly to the shorter version having been prepared by someone other than Peter Sommer for reasons that, at present, are not entirely clear. If, on the other hand, Sommer himself did prepare the shorter version as well as the longer version, the UEA appears to have withheld correspondence documenting their reason for requesting a second version of the report and whether the second version was backdated. Read More »

If I was hoping to think about more salubrious characters than Lewandowsky, Mann and Gleick, the 2012 AGU convention was the wrong place to start my trip. All three were prominent at the convention.

AGU is a huge convention – over 20,000 people and thousands of presentations. Only a few presentations are sufficiently important to be featured on the AGU billboard leading to the conference halls. Almost the first thing that I saw at the convention was a billboard publicizing a session on the Mann case:

Also prominently advertised was the opportunity to meet one-on-one with an attorney (who I presume to have been Mann’s attorney):

Mann himself was honored as a new AGU Fellow for his achievements in orientation-neutral and low-verification paleoclimate reconstructions, with special citation to his innovative use of upside-down sediments and success in popularizing reconstructions with verification r2 of 0. In addition to his fellowship acceptance, Mann spoke at two other sessions. (My recollection of past AGU conventions was that members were limited to one oral presentation, but this policy seems to have been waived {SM Jan 7 – see note below].) One of the session chairs, who was six foot three or so, wryly asked the audience not to confuse with the little man he was introducing. Mann’s wing-woman in one presentation was the even more diminutive Oreskes, who peeking above the podium, was a fitting consort, both in rhetoric and stature. Oreskes’ opening image was, needless to say, a polar bear on an ice flow.

There were at least three sessions on blogs, one of which was convened by John Cook of SKS. Cook’s invited speakers were Michael Mann, Michael Tobis, Zeke Hausfather, Peter Sinclair. For some reason, Cook’s invitation did not include either Judy Curry or I, both long-time AGU members and proprietors of substantial blogs.

AGU used to be about physical sciences. Its erosion of standards was well exemplified by its inclusion of Stephan Lewandowsky, a social psychologist from western Australia, as co-convenor of two sessions. Lewandowsky’s field of social psychology has recently been severely criticized for lack of replicability. Indeed, Lewandowsky’s own recent work can perhaps be best described as a unique combination of Mannian statistics and Gleickian ethics. Doubtless, this will place Lewandowsky on the short list for next year’s AGU fellows.

But the most surprising, even astonishing, appearance was by Peter Gleick himself. Gleick did not simply return, but was honored by an invitation to speak at a prestigious Union session. I hadn’t even thought to look for Gleick on the program, but noticed him outside a session.

I then checked the AGU program and, to my surprise, learned that Gleick was speaking at a Union session. I went to his session with Neal King of SKS, who I’d been chatting with quite cordially in the early afternoon; I encouraged him to attend. Unfortunately, we missed the start of Gleick’s speech so I can’t comment on whether he was accorded a returning hero’s welcome or not. In any event, here’s Gleick on the podium. (I have a new phone; I hadn’t learned yet learned how to zoom or other obvious things so my quality of picture isnt great).

Gleick’s welcome back to AGU prominence – without serving even the equivalent of a game’s suspension – was pretty startling, given his admitted identity fraud and distribution (and probable fabrication) of a forged document. Last year, then AGU President Mike McPhadren, a colleague of Eric Steig’s at the University of Washington, had stated on behalf of AGU that Gleick had “compromised AGU’s credibility as a scientific society” and that his “transgression cannot be condoned”. McPhadren stated that AGU‘s “guiding core value” was “excellence and integrity in everything we do” – values that would seem to be inconsistent with identity fraud and distribution and/or fabrication of forged documents, even by the relaxed standards of academic institutions.

Although McPhadren had stated that Gleick’s “transgression” would not be “condoned”, AGU’s warm welcome to Gleick shows that McPhadren’s words meant nothing, because AGU has in fact condoned Gleick’s actions. Take a look at the definition of “condone” in respect to an offence or transgression, where its etymology, curiously, derives from adultery cases. dictionary.com says:

1. to overlook or forgive (an offence)
2. (Law) Law (esp of a spouse) to pardon or overlook (an offence, usually adultery)

Another dictionary amplifies the second definition as follows:

2) to forgive the marital infidelity of one’s spouse and resume marital sexual relations on the condition that the sin is not repeated

It’s hard to contemplate a more vivid example of an institution pardoning or overlooking an offence and resuming relations. In other words, McPhadren’s words meant nothing. By its actions, AGU has “condoned” Gleick’s identity fraud and distribution and (almost certain) fabrication of a forged document.

Opposite the well-publicized session with Mann’s lawyer was a little publicized workshop of the AGU Ethics Task Force. (Update Jan 7: As I mention in a comment below, I presume that AGU scheduled them at the same time on the basis that people interested in ethics would not be interested in meeting with Mann’s lawyer and vice versa.) In any event, the ethics workshop was sparsely attended – probably the most sparsely attended session at the entire conference. Other than members of the Task Force, I doubt if there were more than 15 attendees (out of 20,000 or so.)

The session was led by Linda Gunderson, Gleick’s successor as chair of the Ethics Task Force, Linda Gundersen. Readers may recall Willis Eschenbach’s impassioned open letter to Gundersen last year. Willis was, as usual, plain spoken:

Make no mistake. If Peter Gleick walks away from this debacle free of expulsion, sanction, or censure from the AGU, without suffering any further penalties, your reputation and the reputation of the AGU will forever join his on the cutting room floor. People are already laughing at the spectacle of the chair of a task force on scientific integrity getting caught with his entire arm in the cookie jar. You have one, and only one, chance to stop the laughter…

You have a clear integrity case staring you in the face. If you only respond to Dr. Gleick’s reprehensible actions with vague platitudes about “the importance of …”, if the Task Force’s only contribution is mealy-mouthed mumblings about how “we deplore …” and “we are disappointed …”, I assure you that people will continue to point and laugh at that kind of spineless pretense of scientific integrity.

Gundersen spoke about AGU’s work on ethics, but made no mention of her predecessor as Chair of the Ethics Task Force and provided no explanation of his return as an invited speaker at a Union session. I asked Gundersen whether the AGU Task Force on Ethics had considered the Gleick affair and, if so, what were its conclusions. In particular, I asked whether they had investigated the forged strategy memo which Gleick had distributed, but had not confessed to.

Gundersen said that the Task Force had not considered the Gleick affair at all. It had done no investigation of Gleick’s conduct whatever. She said that Gleick wasn’t her responsibility and refused to be drawn into commenting on the affair in any way. She observed that the proposed Ethics Policy had not been in place at the time of the Gleick affair and that the AGU could therefore not retroactively apply the policy to Gleick, suggesting that this further demonstrated the need for an AGU ethics policy. She also observed that, in any event, the primary responsibility for enforcing ethics lay with the employing institution. (In Gleick’s case, the Pacific Institute, whose “investigation”, to my knowledge, did not include contact with Heartland Institute or any investigation of the document forgery.) [Update Jan 7- For the record, in response to Gundersen’s unsatisfactory answers to my questions, I told Gundersen that I thought that AGU’s failure to confront the problem warranted criticism and that I intended to do so as forcefully as I could.}

While I endorse AGU’s adoption of a more formal ethics policy, I do not agree that AGU was completely naked prior to adoption of a formal code. It doesn’t require a formal code for an organization to expect its officers, committee chairs and members not to commit fraud or to forge documents, as, for example, McPhadren’s original statement which relied only on AGU’s core value of “excellence and integrity”.

Willis had worried that the Task Force would respond to Gleick’s conduct only “with vague platitudes about ‘the importance of …’” or “mealy-mouthed mumblings about how ‘we deplore …’ and ‘we are disappointed …’. In fact, the AGU Ethics Task Force did not even do that much. They totally ignored the issue, while Gleick was welcomed back.

So for anyone wanting a break from Mannian statistics, Gleickian ethics, especially as synthesized by Lewandowsky, this year’s AGU conference was a bad one.

Don’t get me wrong. I had more pleasant moments at AGU than unpleasant ones. I arrived late on Monday, had excellent dinners with good company the next three days and, on Friday night was off to New Zealand and then Thailand. I’m home now. While I was away, I had to file pleadings in my Yamal FOI appeal, had a case conference in my Wahl attachment appeal and then had to file an application in the Wahl attachment appeal and am a bit weary of pettifogging by UEA lawyers. I’ve been reading the blogs. I’ve got a number of topics in inventory, but have been short on energy. I have some interesting angles on Hurricane Sandy and the New York Panel on Climate Change but they are large new topics and will take time to develop.

Update – Jan 7. A reader pointed out in comments that authors are only allowed one contributed submission but this restriction does not apply to invited presentations. I checked the AGU policy for the 2012 meeting here . It states:

First Authors can have a maximum of one (1) contributed and one (1) invited abstract, or two (2) invited abstracts.

So how did Mann (and Oreskes) come to have three podium appearances. The policy continues:

The only exemption to this policy is the submission of (1) additional contributed abstract to an Education (ED) or Public Affairs (PA) session.

Mann and Oreskes both took this policy to the limit: each made two invited presentations plus one PA session. The invitations are intriguing. Mann’s PA session was convened by