Jan Blits, Reforming the Campus
May a public university manipulate a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request of a faculty member in an effort to squelch the politically incorrect side in the on-going climate wars? The University of Delaware, which has a long, sorry history of political correctness, seems to think that it may, even if its actions violate the faculty member’s academic freedom, Delaware’s FOIA law, and the University’s own FOIA policy.
In December, 2009, David Legates, a University of Delaware professor who was the Delaware State Climatologist from 2005 to 2011, received a FOIA request from Greenpeace. It sought Legates’ “e-mail correspondence and financial and conflict of interest disclosures” “in the possession of or generated by the Office of the Delaware State Climatologist” from January 1, 2000, concerning “global climate change.” Legates is an outspoken critic of the evidence used to show the human effect on climate.
Under Delaware state law, FOIA requests to the University for a faculty member’s academic materials are limited to activities supported by state funding. During Legates’ tenure, the State Climate Office received no state (or University) funding. Nor did Legates receive any state funds for his work as State Climatologist, and the State Climate Office never undertook activities concerning “global climate change.” In short, none of Legates’ work fell within the scope of the FOIA request.
Nevertheless, UD Vice President and General Counsel. Lawrence White, decided that Legates must provide more than Greenpeace had requested, not only all State Climate Office documents, but all documents he had on global climate change, whether or not Greenpeace had requested them. White’s expansive list, covering all of Legates’ teaching, research and service materials going back to 2000, included work unrelated to the State Climate Office, whether conducted on Legates’ own time or on University time, through his personal e-mail or his University e-mail, on his personal computer or a University computer, both in hard files and on computer disks. According to White, Legates had no choice. As a faculty member, White instructed him, Legates had to comply with the request of “a senior University official.” It seemed not to matter to White that the Delaware FOIA law limits requests to state-funded activity and UD’s own policy limits it further to research that is state-funded.
The Virginia Supreme Court recently ruled that, despite Virginia’s FOIA law, the University of Virginia was correct in refusing to comply with a FOIA request for the records and e-mails of a former faculty member, Michael Mann, famous (or infamous) for his alarmist “hockey stick” image of the recent rise in global air temperature. The Virginia law had made all UVA faculty members subject to FOIA requests. The Delaware law, in contrast, restricts requests to faculty who are state-funded and to the work they carry out with state funds. (State money accounts for only a small portion of UD’s revenue.) For many years, the University administration has designated some faculty as doing state-funded work, but kept or removed faculty members from the list if administrators believed that they were likely to receive an unwanted FOIA request. For reasons administrators have declined to explain, a small portion of Legates’ teaching salary was, curiously, placed on the list of state-funded activity shortly before Greenpeace filed its FOIA request in 2009.
A month after Greenpeace’s request to Legates, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an opponent of Greenpeace, filed a nearly identical FOIA request with UD for information on three other Delaware faculty members. These three had contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group often (and recently) warning of the catastrophic effects of global warning. White said no, “because the information you seek does not relate to the expenditure of public funds.” When asked to explain the disparate treatment, White told Legates that he (Legates) did not understand the law. Muddling his own argument, White said that while the law did not require him to give Greenpeace all the documents he had requested from Legates, the law did not prohibit him from requiring Legates to produce them. His authority as a “senior University official” evidently trumped Delaware law and University policy. Under pressure, Legates submitted all the demanded materials in March, 2010.
Under Delaware law, FOIA requests must be answered within ten days (unless there is need to consult with an agency counsel), but White did nothing with Legates’ materials for more than 15 months. In June, 2011, he hired a third-year law student to sort through them. “We have interpreted that language [of the Delaware FOIA law] to mean that we are obliged to produce records, otherwise non-privileged, that pertain to work by Dr. Legates that is supported through grants from state agencies,” White wrote. The law-student’s trolling came up short. The resulting file contained, in its entirety, 1) two e-mail exchanges about federal, not state, funding sources, 2) an invitation from a state agency to give a talk on climate change, for which Legates was not paid, and 3) a report to the Governor and General Assembly on the Delaware Water Supply Coordinating Council, which Legates had no hand in writing and in which he is not mentioned, but which he was simply given when he joined the Council.
White had listed a second category of documents, however, which he said the University was also “obliged” to produce. “[A]nd class-room related work such as syllabi, instructional materials, and class postings, (because a small portion of his salary was paid out of state-appropriated funds).” The file of these teaching documents contained 1) materials from Legates’ introductory course on “Climatic Processes,"2) two e-mail exchanges with two off-campus professors about climate change and the classroom, and a third about his speaking in a graduate course, 3) his 2010 CV, and 4) his Climatologist agreement and related correspondence with the Governor’s Chief of Staff. Again, contrary to White’s false claim, the University has no obligation to produce teaching materials. Its own FOIA policy excludes requests for such materials. Teaching has always enjoyed the full protection of academic freedom. Administrators may not examine it except for cause. Despite claiming that he was “obliged” to produce the materials, White, unable to square his action with official policy, state law or rules of academic freedom, tried to trivialize it as harmless: “[T]hese materials strike me as innocuous in the extreme, and I propose to turn them over all over the Greenpeace.”
That was not all. White also decided “to produce copies of speeches, papers, presentations and other materials that were created by Professor Legates and subsequently published, delivered in lecture form, or otherwise made public.” Many of these public items were gathered from the internet by the law student. While conceding that the state FOIA does not require the disclosure of public materials and Greenpeace had not requested them, White said that he would “turn them over [to Greenpeace] only because it seems potentially provocative to me NOT to surrender documents that are already in the public domain” (his caps). Never at a loss for a pretext to trample faculty rights, White, having claimed that it was harmless to violate Legates’ rights, now claimed that it would be harmful NOT to violate his rights.
This is not the first time the University of Delaware has violated a faculty member’s academic freedom and tried to silence controversial research. Twenty-five years ago, the University banned receiving grants from the foundation supporting the research of a faculty member, Linda Gottfredson. In banning the funding, the University granted that for it to “direct...its attention to the content or method of any faculty member’s research or teaching” would violate the faculty member’s academic freedom. Gottfredson won at federal arbitration when she showed that the University did precisely what it stipulated it must not do (full disclosure: I was her co-plaintiff). When reminded of this precedent and the University’s own stipulation, White, reaching for still another excuse to violate Legates’ rights, said that academic freedom does not impede FOIA requests. State law trumps University policy, he said. When reminded that Legates’ materials included nothing that was subject to the Delaware FOIA law, White dismissed the objection out of hand, without answering it. As he disdainfully declared yet again, the faculty member did not adequately understand the intricacies of the law.
It would be bad enough had White properly applied the FOIA law and UD policy to Legates, but only Legates, and exempted the three politically correct faculty from the burden he levied on Legates. But, much worse, in the guise of asserting his administrative authority and his superior understanding of the law, White repeatedly misrepresented and ignored the established policy and law. Again and again, he fabricated his own policy and law, and justified his actions against Legates on specious grounds. He used his position as Vice President and General Counsel to transform faculty protections against political interference into a cudgel to silence one side in the current climate debate.
See more here.
Meanwhile at UVA, the administration spent a $1M to prevent Michael Mann’s emails from being released because that violated his privacy rights as a faculty member. If you’re on the right (really the left) side of this issue you are protected, if not your a target.
Distractions, agendas, false realities, and policies that bring much harm but few benefits
The White House has released its latest National Climate Assessment. An 829-page report and 127-page “summary” were quickly followed by press releases, television appearances, interviews and photo ops with tornado victims - all to underscore President Obama’s central claims:
Human-induced climate change, “once considered an issue for the distant future, has moved firmly into the present.” It is “affecting Americans right now,” disrupting their lives. The effects of “are already being felt in every corner of the United States.” Corn producers in Iowa, oyster growers in Washington, maple syrup producers in Vermont, crop-growth cycles in Great Plains states “are all observing climate-related changes that are outside of recent experience.” Extreme weather events “have become more frequent and/or intense.”
It’s pretty scary sounding. It has to be. First, it is designed to distract us from topics that the President and Democrats do not want to talk about: ObamaCare, the IRS scandals, Benghazi, a host of foreign policy failures, still horrid jobless and workforce participation rates, and an abysmal 0.1% first quarter GDP growth rate that hearkens back to the Great Depression.
Second, fear-inducing “climate disruption” claims are needed to justify job-killing, economy-choking policies like the endless delays on the Keystone XL pipeline; still more wind, solar and ethanol mandates, tax breaks and subsidies; and regulatory compliance costs that have reached $1.9 trillion per year nearly one-eighth of the entire US economy.
Third, scary hyperventilating serves to obscure important realities about Earth’s weather and climate, and even in the NCA report itself. Although atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have been rising steadily for decades, contrary to White House claims, average planetary temperatures have not budged for 17 years.
No Category 3-5 hurricane has made landfall in the United States since 2005, the longest such period since at least 1900. Even with the recent Midwestern twisters, US tornado frequency remains very low, and property damage and loss of life from tornadoes have decreased over the past six decades.
Sea levels are rising at a mere seven inches per century. Antarctic sea ice recently reached a new record high. A new report says natural forces could account for as much as half of Arctic warming, and warming and cooling periods have alternated for centuries in the Arctic. Even in early May this year, some 30% of Lake Superior was still ice-covered, which appears to be unprecedented in historical records. Topping it off, a warmer planet and rising CO2 levels improve forest, grassland and crop growth, greening the planet.
Press releases on the NCA report say global temperatures, heat waves, sea levels, storms, droughts and was done by computer models which are based on the false assumption that carbon dioxide now drives climate change, and that powerful natural forces no longer play a role. The models have never been able to predict global temperatures accurately, and the divergence between model predictions and actual measured temperatures gets worse with every passing year. The models cannot even “hindcast” temperatures over the past quarter century, without using fudge factors and other clever tricks.
Moreover, much of the White House and media spin contradicts what the NCA report actually says. For example, it concludes that “there has been no universal trend in the overall extent of drought across the continental U.S. since 1900.” Other trends in severe storms, it states, “are uncertain.”
Climate change, Johnstown Floods, Dust Bowls, extreme weather events and forest fires have been part of Earth and human history forever and no amount of White House spin can alter that fact. To suggest that any changes in weather or climate or any temporary increases in extreme weather events are due to humans is patently absurd. To ignore positive trends and the 17-year absence of warming is abominable.
Fourth, sticking to the “manmade climate disaster” script is essential to protect the turf, reputations, funding and power of climate alarmists and government bureaucrats. The federal government doles out some $2.6 billion annually in grants for climate research but only for work that reflects White House perspectives. Billions more support subsidies and loans for renewable energy programs that represent major revenue streams for companies large and small, and part of that money ends up in campaign war chests for (mostly Democrat) legislators who support the climate regulatory-industrial complex.
None of them is likely to admit any doubts, alter any claims or policies, or reduce their increasingly vitriolic attacks on skeptics of “dangerous manmade global warming.” They do not want to risk being exposed as false prophets and charlatans, or worse. Follow the money.
Last, and most important, climate disruption claims drive a regulatory agenda that few Americans support. Presidential candidate Obama said his goal was “fundamentally transforming” the United States and ensuring that electricity rates “necessarily skyrocket.” On climate change, President Obama has made it clear that he “can’t wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job. Where they won’t act, I will.” His Environmental Protection Agency, Department of the Interior, Department of Energy and other officials have steadfastly implemented his anti-hydrocarbon policies.
Chief Obama science advisor John Holdren famously said: “A massive campaign must be launched to… de-develop the United States ...bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation....[Economists] must design a stable, low-consumption economy in which there is a much more equitable [re]distribution of wealth.”
(The President also wants to ensure that neither a Keystone pipeline approval nor a toned-down climate agenda scuttles billionaire Tom Steyer’s $100-million contribution to Democrat congressional candidates.)
This agenda translates into greater government control over energy production and use, job creation and economic growth, and people’s lives, livelihoods, living standards, liberties, health and welfare. It means fewer opportunities and lower standards of living for poor and middle class working Americans. It means greater power and control for politicians, bureaucrats, activists and judges but with little or no accountability for mistakes made, damage done or penalties deliberately exacted on innocent people.
A strong economy, modern technologies, and abundant, reliable, affordable energy are absolutely essential if we are to adapt to future climate changes, whatever their cause and survive the heat waves, cold winters, floods, droughts and vicious weather events that will most certainly continue coming.
The Obama agenda will reduce our capacity to adapt, survive and thrive. It will leave more millions jobless, and reduce the ability of families to heat and cool their homes properly, assure nutritious meals, pay their rent or mortgage, and pursue their American dreams.
America’s minority and blue collar families will suffer - while Washington, DC power brokers and lobbyists will continue to enjoy standards of living, housing booms and luxury cars unknown in the nation’s heartland. Think Hunger Games or the Politburo and nomenklatura of Soviet Russia.
Worst, it will all be for nothing, even if carbon dioxide does exert a stronger influence on Earth’s climate than actual evidence suggests. While the United States slashes its hydrocarbon use, job creation, economic growth and international competitiveness, China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and Spain, Germany, France and Great Britain are all increasing their coal use ... and CO2 emissions.
President Obama and White House advisor John Podesta are convinced that Congress and the American people have no power or ability to derail the Administration’s determination to unilaterally impose costly policies to combat “dangerous manmade climate disruption” - and that the courts will do nothing to curb their executive orders, regulatory fiats and economic disruption.
If they are right, we are in for some very rough times and it becomes even more critical that voters learn the facts and eject Harry Reid and his Senate majority, to restore some semblance of checks and balances.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.
A team of 14 scientists rebutted these scare points raised by the UCS - see our press release and detailed rebuttal. A similar effort, taking a different approach than other rebuttals is being made for the equally flawed NCA report - to be posted this weekend.
UNH UCS REBUTTAL
CLAIMS MADE:
(1) “The resulting reports detail how the state has been getting warmer and wetter over the last century, how the rate of change has increased over the last four decades, and how those trends will likely continue over the 21st century.”
(2) “Annual average precipitation may increase 14 to 20 percent across the state. Precipitation events that drop more than four inches of precipitation in 48 hours are projected to increase two to three fold.”
(3) “More frequent extreme precipitation events combined with development in our watersheds will likely lead to more frequent and larger flooding events.”
(4) “Average annual temperatures may rise as much as 4 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit across the state.”
(5) “Summer temperatures may experience the most dramatic change, up 11 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. The frequency of extreme heat days is projected to increase dramatically, and the hottest days will be hotter, impacting human health, infrastructure, and the electrical grid.”
(6) “Extreme cold temperatures may occur less frequently, and extreme cold days may be warmer than in the past.”
(7) “Warming winters will reduce opportunities for snow- and ice-related recreation (and related economic activity).”
(8) “The growing season may get longer, which may provide opportunities for farmers to grow new crops. However, many existing crops will likely experience yield losses associated with increased frequency of high temperature stress, an increase in soil erosion and crop failure resulting from more frequent extreme precipitation events, inadequate winter chill period for optimum fruiting, and increased pressure from invasive weeds, insects, or disease.”
(9) “We’ve already bought several decades of climate change because of all the CO2 in the atmosphere. But the most effective way to deal with change in the climate is to reduce carbon pollution.”
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
April 29, 2014
PRESS RELEASE
UNH and Union of Concerned Scientist Report is Wrong on the Facts
14 Prominent Scientists and Academics Refute Claims with Historical Data
CONCORD, NH - Today a group of prominent scientists and meteorologists called into question the findings of a recent study by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the University of New Hampshire, “Climate Change in New Hampshire: Past, Present, and Future.”
“It is disappointing that New Hampshire’s leading University has chosen to publish a report which is not grounded on actual facts, but on conjecture,” stated Joe D’Aleo. ‘The authors have based all of their findings on the failed climate models. Scientists like Dr. John Christy and Dr. Judith Curry have written extensively on the failure of the climate models and how the projections fall below accepted levels of scientific significance. UNH and the UCS blindly hold to the model forecasts for their projections, despite the models incredibly poor track record.
Citing data from numerous national and global climate resources, the group identified nine specific claims that actual data refutes. This includes claims about extreme weather, changes in New Hampshire’s temperatures, reduction in our snowfall and changes in our agricultural production. All of these claims are contradicted by the facts.
“We cannot understand how scientists can use these flawed models as the basis for their projections,” continued Mr. D’Aleo. “Just as concerning is how these scientists do not provide policy makers and elected officials a fair and unbiased representation of what is going on with our weather and climate. Our brief report can provide decision makers with a better understanding of our climate through actual data instead of the conjecture provided by UNH and the UCS.”
See full report here
See also my weekly Weather Whys and Climate Wise local story “Sitting on the world’s greatest supply of gas and oil, we may face shortages because of green energy policies”. I heard from a Canadian today, electricity bills in Ontario, where policies enacted by Maurice Strong who pushed for the IPCC and one world government has sent their energy costs sky high reaching $1000/month. Ontario also banned the use of wood and wood pellet stoves. Here in this country, hyper hypocrite, Tom Steyer, who made his billions trading coal, is offering millions in support for democrats who will fight the Keystone pipeline or rail or truck transport of the oil we need. Meanwhile Harry is obsessed with the Koch brothers and fear over the loss of his Senate leadership but defends his billionaires in Nevada and the Soros family as well meaning when their goal is to destroy our economy and wrestle more control and ultimately achieve their long time goal of one world government.
People are beginning to wake up. We need your help. Art Horn has a program to open eyes and minds and has ben invited to talk to some high schools here in the state, but they don’t have the budget to pay expenses. Please donate even small amounts so we can have him come and speak to maybe several hundred young people (teachers and others on the outside will be invited) later this month. He has to travel 4 hours and set aside forensic and other work for the day which p[ay his bills. Thanks.