By Christopher C. Horner, David W. Schnare and Del. Robert Marshall 01/05/11 8:05 PM
Today, Virginia taxpayers, a state lawmaker and a public interest law firm are asking the University of Virginia to produce important “global warming” records under that state’s Freedom of Information Act. These are records the school no longer denies possessing but nonetheless refuses to release, even to Commonwealth Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. They address one of the most high-profile claims used to advance massive economic-intervention policies in the name of “global warming.”
In response to a previous FOIA request, U.Va. denied these records existed. However, during Cuccinelli’s pre-investigation under the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act ("FATA"), a 2007 law passed unanimously by Virginia’s legislature, which clearly covers the work of taxpayer-funded academics, U.Va. stunningly dropped this stance. For this reversal, the taxpayers of Virginia owe Cuccinelli a debt of gratitude.
Still, the school has spent upward of half a million dollars to date fighting Cuccinelli’s pursuit, now before the Virginia Supreme Court. However, Virginia’s transparency statute FOIA gives the school one week to produce the documents, and offers no exemption for claims U.Va. is using to block Cuccinelli’s inquiry.
These e-mails and other documents relate to claims made by Michael Mann to obtain, and claim payment under, certain taxpayer-funded grants. Mann worked at the university’s department of environmental sciences when he produced what was hailed at the time as the “smoking gun” affirming the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming.
Despite that lofty honorific, persistent controversy led promoters of this notorious “Hockey Stick” graph (principally, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC) to stop advancing it as serious work.
Leaked “ClimateGate” e-mails discussing these same controversies prompted Cuccinelli’s pre-investigation. Sadly, in order to keep the taxpayers’ advocate from examining the evidence, U.Va. has offered a series of twists on a novel defense of “academic freedom.”
Now we with the American Tradition Institute’s environmental law center have requested these documents under FOIA and will presumably put an end to these tactics of denial followed by delay.
Importantly, also under FOIA in late 2009, the pressure group Greenpeace sought, and was promised, e-mails and other materials of Patrick Michaels, who also formerly worked in the same university department.
While the university proceeded to compile the material for Greenpeace, one of us, Virginia Del. Bob Marshall, R-Prince William, thought to ask for records relating to Michaels’ former colleague, Mann. Oddly, the university informed Marshall that such records no longer existed because Mann had left the department.
Michaels has stated that the university, in explaining to him these disparate responses, asserted that some people’s records are treated differently than others. Mann’s were allegedly destroyed; Michaels’ were being packaged for delivery to Greenpeace.
One disparity possibly helping to explain the other was that Mann had been an active participant in the IPCC, obtaining many research grants for his work at U.Va. But Michaels had been a very politically incorrect, high-profile “skeptic” of catastrophist claims such as those represented by the IPCC, and particularly Mann’s Hockey Stick.
In court in August, U.Va. opted against robustly defending, as a legal argument, its academic-freedom rationale for refusing to produce the records. Yet even this week, it is asking the Virginia Supreme Court to deny Cuccinelli’s request for documents possibly showing whether the dense Hockey Stick smoke indeed indicates fire. This does Virginia taxpayers a disservice.
Other records obtained under FOIA reveal that U.Va. has been paying Washington lawyers several thousand dollars per day to deny the requested transparency. As such, in a separate request, we also seek information about this privately underwritten effort to avoid complying with Cuccinelli’s inquiry.
The university has previously demanded taxpayers pay thousands of dollars for a FOIA search for Mann’s records, on the grounds that it maintains a broadly dispersed record-keeping system. Therefore, we have specifically directed the school to only search the backup server it claimed to the attorney general’s office that it finally located as the likely home of the Mann records. As such, demands for huge search fees should not be an obstacle.
We hope for prompt university compliance with FOIA, although we are prepared to fully protect our appellate rights. As Virginia taxpayers, we also hope to see U.Va. rise to its reputation and reflect the highest fidelity toward its statutory and other obligations.
We can then, finally, determine what it is that so many have gone to such great lengths to keep the public from knowing about that for which the public has paid.
Christopher C. Horner is senior director of litigation for the American Tradition Institute’s law center and a Virginia resident; David W. Schnare, Ph.D is a Virginia resident and a federal attorney, Del. Bob Marshall is a Virginia Republican delegate representing Prince William County.
Read more at the Washington Examiner here.
By Andrew Bolt
Climate Change Minister Penny Wong had an excuse worked out back in 2009, to explain why the world’s atmosphere had not warmed over the decade as the warmists had predicted.
No, no, no, she said when finally pressed for an explanation by Family First Senator Steve Fielding. The best evidence for global warming was not to be found in air temperatures but those of the seas:
“In terms of a single indicator of global warming, change in ocean heat content is most appropriate.”
Small problem. The evidence even then suggested the seas weren’t actually warming. Now Professors Robert Knox and David Douglass of Rochester University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy have even more bad news for Wong and the rest of the warmist Gillard Government. According to their latest paper, in the International Journal of Geosciences, the seas have been cooling, not warming, as measured by the Argo floats:
A recently published estimate of Earth’s global warming trend is 0.63 plus/minus 0.28 W/m2, as calculated from ocean heat content anomaly data spanning 1993-2008. This value is not representative of the recent (2003-2008) warming/cooling rate because of a “flattening” that occurred around 2001-2002. Using only 2003-2008 data from Argo floats, we find by four different algorithms that the recent trend ranges from -0.010 to -0.160 W/m2 with a typical error bar of plus/minus 0.2 W/m2. These results fail to support the existence of a frequently-cited large positive computed radiative imbalance.
So what’s the Government’s argument now?
This actually confirms a trend in Wong’s style of arguing the case - a trend of very dodgy, if not downright deceptive, behaviour. For instance, Wong has also been far too eager to exploit any hot summer day as corroboration of global warming theory, while pooh-poohing the naturally corollary - that cold and wet summers must tend to contradict that same theory:
ALI MOORE, PRESENTER: South-eastern Australia endured another scorching day today with temperatures in the 40s across South Australia, Victoria and southern New South Wales… Federal Climate Change Minister Penny Wong says the heatwave is consistent with global warming predictions; bad news for those sweating through the week.
She has also been far too eager to ascribe the usual changes in the weather - especially the recent drought - to global warming:
AUSTRALIA’S top climate scientist has contradicted Federal Government claims the drought in the Murray Darling Basin is due to global warming.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lead author, Prof Neville Nicholls, said the claim was not backed by science. “The current dry period (in the Murray Darling Basin) might still be just a fluke, or natural variability,” Prof Nicholls said. “We cannot confidently attribute it to global warming.”
Yet Federal Climate Change and Water Minister Penny Wong has repeatedly claimed the basin’s drought is due to climate change. ‘Research shows that this severe, extended drought is clearly linked with global warming,” Senator Wong said in November last year. “There is nowhere that this challenge is more serious than the Murray Darling Basin.”
Closely allied to that trick has been Wong’s participation in heads-I-win, tails-you-lose argumentation. A recent example:
Last year brought drought: “Research shows that this severe, extended drought is clearly linked with global warming,” (Climate Minister Penny) Wong said.
This year brought rain: GLOBAL warming may have given Australia its wettest September in more than 100 years, but “extreme dry years” lie ahead, the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) says.
And then there was her use of dodgy data to support the wildest scare-claims:
As we noted yesterday, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong this week released a suspiciously-timed report claiming 250,000 Australian homes could be drowned by rising seas by 2100, thanks to global warming.
Her much-publicised report claimed warming could cause the seas to rise not by the 59cms that the most gloomy IPCC model put as the upper limit, but by 1.1 metres - or even 1.90 metres.
Yesterday, with the help of reader Lazlo, I showed how Wong’s report, produced by her own department, in fact actually told untruths about the IPCC predictions and relied on a discredited paper to justify its much more alarmist figure.
Then in a second post, Kris Sayce, editor of Money Morning, showed even more flaws: the misrepresention and use of Bureau of Metereology data which the bureau itself said was unreliable, the use of data guaranteed to exaggerate recent rises in sea level, and a false claim that these recent rises were unprecedented.
Now reader Cohenite points out yet more flaws which turn Wong’s report into a farce...Does this really strike you as the record of a warmist driven scrupulously by science, with a keen eye for evidence? Is this the kind of case on which should rest a colossal new green tax and the complete reorganisation of the Australian economy?
Read more here.
PRESS RELEASE
U.S. Chamber’s Endorsement of “Progressive Wolf in Banker’s Clothing” as White House Chief-of-Staff Questioned by National Center for Public Policy Research
At JPMorgan, Daley Led Charge to Raise the Price of Fossil Fuels in Service of Climate Change Agenda
Washington, D.C. - Experts from the National Center for Public Policy Research are questioning the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s endorsement of Bill Daley, a progressive banker who supports climate change policies, as White House chief-of-staff.
“Daley’s appointment reaffirms President Obama’s war on fossil fuels. As head of JPMorgan’s corporate social responsibility department, Daley lead the charge to raise the price of fossil fuels by advocating a climate change policy that is hostile to carbon-based energy - coal, gasoline and natural gas,” said Tom Borelli, Ph.D., director of the National Center’s Free Enterprise Project.
The goal of JPMorgan Chase’s climate change policy is “to advocate that the US government adopt a market-based national policy on greenhouse gas emissions, which includes all sources of emissions and is fair. Options include either a cap-and-trade or tax policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the lowest possible cost.”
“In Daley’s twisted progressive mind, taxing energy in a fragile economy is good public policy. Daley’s global warming stance, however, is not surprising; after all he served as the chairman of Al Gore’s failed presidential campaign,” added Tom Borelli.
“Because of Daley’s support of energy taxes, I’m questioning the judgment of U.S. Chamber President Tom Donahue for hailing Obama’s appointment. As a veteran D.C insider, Donahue should be able to recognize a progressive wolf in banker’s clothing,” said Deneen Borelli, fellow with Project 21.
“Daley’s support of energy taxes should be a major cause of concern for the business community that Donahue is supposed to represent. Perhaps part of the Tea Party movement should be dispatched to watch Donahue to make sure the Chamber advocates for free enterprise and not shady inside-the-beltway deals,” added Deneen Borelli.
Daley also has ties to Exelon, the Chicago based utility that has taken a lead role in attacking coal-based electricity generation. He advised Exelon on its failed effort to buy Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. in 2004.
Exelon is a member of the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP, a cap-and-trade lobbying organization and the company was a recipient of a $200 million grant from Obama’s economic stimulus plan.
The Wall Street Journal recently exposed the Obama-Exelon connection.
“Daley’s appointment shows President Obama really wants energy prices to skyrocket. The question remains why Donohue is joining that parade,” said Deneen Borelli.
See post here.