U. of Virginia Agrees to Release Climate Researcher’s E-Mails

If you work for state government, you work for the public. Cuccinelli and ATI’s motivations are hardly disinterested or even sincere, but if you work for the public, then by and large you need to work IN public, and the motives of those seeking public records are irrelevant..

oh, i misread you post. i thought you said about the pursuit of better science which would be a great improvement for climate scientists and particularly those from the UK.  Google Cyril Burt and Galton and see what you come up with relative to data and science.

Witch-hunting is alive and well in Virginia. 
The invertebrate nature of the University of Virginia is also apparent.
As for Cuccinelli & the American Tradition Institute (whoever they are) the parable about casting the first stone comes to mind.
A charming french minister in the 17th century boasted that “Give me two lines of a man’s handwriting and I will find a reason to hang them.”  A determined witch-hunter would find something sinister in all the spam I get every day.  Did I open it? Did I trash it without opening it?  Had the system at my university classified it as “Spam” and yet I still opened it?
As a working scientist I trash analyses and data every day based on my judgement of what it is worth. I change drafts of my papers all the time as my ideas develop.  Am I committing fraud?  I do not think so.  I am using my judgement (right or wrong). 

This is going to be fun! “Hide the decline!” indeed!

“A charming french minister in the 17th century boasted that ‘Give me two lines of a man’s handwriting and I will find a reason to hang them.’”

Or, as our good friends at the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit put it, “give me two temperature data points and we’ll have everyone believe the climate is ‘warming!’”

If I am not mistaken, UVa is a private institution, not a state school, although it does receive some federal and state funds.

You may well be right, hence my observation that Cuccinelli/ATI are hardly disinterested. That said, public records are, well, public, and records received or created by public agencies in their normal course of business are presumptively public (and damned well ought to be). If Cuccinelli and his friends are on a witch hunt — and I suspect they’re seeking a PR victory, not to wrongfully imprison anyone, though I could be wrong about that — the way to deal with that problem is not by illegally denying access to public records. In Cuccinelli’s case, disbarment would be the appropriate response for PR mischief and prison for trying to jail anyone on trumped-up “fraud” charges.

I quite unironically advocate public hanging for all public officials who violate their oaths of office. And yet I am frequently mischaracterized as “liberal.” Go figure.

No, SophiaMerry, this is not fun. This is one of the most serious challenges humankind has faced, and we’ve turned it into a political sideshow, haven’t we?
 
I know that you wish that the science were wrong, just as much as I wish the science were wrong, and just as much as Al Gore wishes the science were wrong, but it just isn’t. The evidence is too overwhelming. All the arguments about the phrase “Hide the decline” in the East Anglia e-mails won’t make the Greenland ice sheet stop melting, now so quickly that some of the glaciers are moving at rates you can see just standing near them and looking. All the quotes about temperature data points extracted from those e-mails don’t make the planet’s temperature stop rising more sharply over the last half a lifetime than we can find anywhere else in the Holocene record after the Younger Dryas event. (And all the old arguments about heat islands don’t change the fact that the heat island theory has been discredited many different ways, and that satellite measurements have always shown that the Earth is warming, essentially in agreement with ground measurements, once you correct the error you will make if you forget to account for satellite and instrument drift.) All the arguments about the Sun being the “big dog” of the solar system and therefore the “obvious” cause of warming don’t change the fact that we just came off the hottest decade in recorded history during a period in which the Sun was also going through the longest and deepest minimum we have ever measured. (Furthermore, before we even had good records of stratospheric temperature change, we also had scientists telling us how we could tell whether the Sun would be the cause of planetary warming – If the Sun were, then the extra solar energy pouring in would warm the stratosphere, but if we were trapping heat down here with greenhouse gases, then some of that heat wouldn’t get reflected back up to the stratosphere, and it would cool. And we know now that the stratosphere is cooling.) All the Henry’s Law arguments about how the oceans will sop up all the carbon dioxide as fast as we can emit it (see, e.g., Steve Goreham’s “Climatism!”, pp. 40-43) can’t change the fact that it just plain isn’t happening, as one fast glance at the Keeling curve verifies. All the arguments by science fiction writer Michael Crichton that Antarctic cooling proves that global warming isn’t happening can’t make it any different that when you manage to knock a powerful greenhouse gas (ozone) out of the atmosphere in a climatologically isolated area (central Antarctica), climate science predicts that the area very well *could* cool down – for a while. And it doesn’t change the fact that once you get far enough away from the center of Antarctica, to the Antarctic Peninsula, ice shelf collapse due to warming is now happening frighteningly fast.
 
Yeah, pieces of the science are not yet perfectly understood, and that allows some folks an entry point to do what University of Texas law professor Thomas McGarity calls “corpuscular analysis”, where you argue that small pieces of the picture may not be completely consistent with the overall portrait, and therefore one should distrust the science. (See, e.g., the argument by Singer and Avery in “Unstoppable Global Warming – Every 1500 Years”, p. 164, that we should doubt climate-change-induced species extinction because [1] a single glacier in Wyoming warmed up suddenly in the nineteenth century without apparently causing any local extinction [though it's tough to see how Singer and Avery came to that conclusion when the research cited consisted of sampling an ice core in a refrigerated room in Denver that was taken years before, and mentions species extinction nowhere since that is not what the researchers were researching], and [2] the Younger Dryas event early in the Holocene didn’t cause an extinction [which is an odd claim, given that the event is sometimes known as the Younger Dryas extinction]).
 
The science is settled; it’s over. We can, and should, have vigorous arguments about what to do about the problem, but we can’t continue to hope that it’s not really happening. When not just the climate scientists are telling us this, but it is also the overwhelming consensus of geologists, biologists, oceanographers, chemists, atmospheric physicists, and just about everyone who works in any of the field sciences I didn’t just mention, then we had better start listening. And, no, there is no significant disagreement about the reality within the scientific community, no matter how many times the same five climate change deniers are called to testify before Congress.
 
It certainly is true that alarmism isn’t helpful, particularly when there are still many things we can do about this problem without giving up our lifestyles. But one thing we cannot do is to continue to pull a bag over our head and say that we can’t see it happening. It’s getting too hot inside that bag.

You are correct, the science is settled.  The world is flat; science settled there too, for a long time.  No question, all the evidence pointed to it, every data point. The point is, the science is not settled, lots of different information, and the real point is that all the backroom info should be put out in the open so the frauds can be called frauds and the real science can be studied.  Then we can come to an honest discussion about global warming, if it is real or not.

Why did UVA cave?  Maybe because they are no longer afraid of losing faculty to the University of  Wisconsin or to the University of Texas. 

Some information may be useful.

1) First, there was VA AG Ken Cuccinelli and his assistant Wesley Russell, both mid-1990s law grads from George Mason University, well-funded by the Koch brothers, home of the Mercatus Center and also home to Edward Wegman, see
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/journal-retracts-george-mason-u-scholars-critique-of-global-warming/33108
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v473/n7348/full/473419b.html  Nature editorial -
It has now taken GMU 14+ months and they are as yet unable to complete a simple inquiry, given a few pages of obvious near-verbatim plagiarism.

Their first Cuccinelli  try bounced, the last CID I’ve seen relies heavily on the 2006 Wegman Report, and on p.18 is commentary on peer review, which is the same material as in the article to be retracted:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/virginiapolitics/New%20Mann%20CID.PDF 
2) ATI is another one of those couple-person Washington, DC-area thinktanks (i.e. non-profit PR & lobbying, but nice website):
http://www.americantraditioninstitute.org/
They are too new of have any funding records yet..  You can peruse your website and guess who might be funding them.

In this case, one key person is Chris Horner, a lawyer with a long history of climate anti-science, generally associated with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, but these folks often manage to have multiple affiliations.

http://www.desmogblog.com/crescendo-climategate-cacophony
See p.12 (Horner entry) and the Horner line on pp.97-98 that shows activities and affiliations.  Most of his affiliated thinktanks or fronts included tobacco involvement, and some certainly included fossil fuel involvement (and others are pretty likely, just couldn’t find the funding trails.)  He isn’t associated with ALEC (whose ire was aroused by William Cronon at U WI), but ALEC is in the table, funded by the same groups, at least in part.

ATI’s effort also relies on the Wegman Report.
http://www.atinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ATI_v_UVA_FOIA_First_Petition_final_5-15-11.pdf  p.14

I look forward to a follow up in a year. Good luck!

“The overall goal of the high-tech dorm, Mr. Kornbluh says, is to teach students “IT IQ”—the ability to understand when a piece of technology is useful and when it isn’t. Faculty directors and social scientists will be watching to evaluate what’s effective, he says.”

Here’s hoping that this aspect is successful — far too much  ”ooooh, pretty, shiny” in the name of enhancing learning.

I am certainly glad to see all these initiatives in IT applications in learning environments. Do not be afraid to share the successes and disappointments that come out of this. Innovations and experimentations do stimulate the desire to learn and explore NEW FRONTIERS in why and how we LEARN.

The age of BORING, “passive” learning through LARGE classroom face-to-face lectures (“classroom tranquilizers”) is slowly DYING! I could have become a FIRST CLASS astrophysicist who could have DISCOVERED “cures” for many incurable diseases that plague mankind today IF I had been MOTIVATED to take physics seriously in K-12 50 years ago! Keep on trying and DO NOT be discouraged by those who are always afraid to TRY innovations. Certainly, many may “fail” but there is always something new to learn from “failure!”