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Judge Preserves Privacy of Climate Scientist's Emails
ananyo writes "Climate scientist Michael Mann reported Monday that he and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville have prevailed in a court case against the conservative American Tradition Institute (ATI), which had sought access to emails he wrote while serving as a professor at the school from 1999-2005. Now at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Mann says the ruling supports the University of Virginia's argument than an exemption to the state's freedom-of-information law 'applies to faculty communications in furtherance of their work.' The Prince William County Circuit Court ruling came directly from the bench in and was not immediately available online. The Virgina Supreme Court tossed out a case against Mann in March. The state's conservative attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, had, among other things, demanded access to the climatologist's emails, arguing that Mann might have manipulated data and thus defrauded the government in applying for scientific grants."
Wrong. Being an" employee of the state" never means that all your emails are a matter of public record.
Public record laws vary; what matters is what a particular law specifically sets out as included. Several courts have held that a state open records law does not apply to personal email accounts but does apply to ex-officio ones (e.g. president@university.edu), or applies only to those emails in which state business is conducted. For example, Colorado's open records law applies to e-mail communications between more than two elected officials or public employees.
But one important takeaway is that anyone using a state email address is wise to conduct their personal business on their own accounts.
Unfortunately, this now appears to be true for some people's professional work as well. Many university climate research and other controversial programs now incorporate as private "Centers" that run their own email systems so as to provide researchers with an alternative to the state-funded email accounts. Corporate email accounts are generally afforded greater exemption from state open records laws even if the researcher is also an employee of the state.
there's just the simple fact that climate changes happen in geologic time frames, and we literally don't have any direct measurements of that scale.
I'm sitting less that 250 metres away from a giant freezer full of Ice and sediment core samples that would disagree with your statement.
You can't very well dust CO2 for fingerprints.
The change in the carbon 12/carbon 13 ratio in the atmosphere is a direct fingerprint of human derived CO2 from burning fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are depleted in C13 because the plants that they came from preferred the lighter C12 isotope. The increase in the C12/C13 ratio is direct evidence that the source is fossil fuels.