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VA Supreme Court: Michael Mann Needn't Turn Over All His Email
RoccamOccam sends news that the Virginia Supreme Court has ruled that Michael Mann, a climate scientist notable for his work on the "hockey stick" graph, does not have to turn over the entirety of his papers and emails under Freedom of Information laws. Roughly 1,000 documents were turned over in response to the request, but another 12,000 remain, which lawyers for the University of Virginia say are "of a proprietary nature," and thus entitled to an exemption. The VA Supreme Court ruled (PDF), "the higher education research exemption's desired effect is to avoid competitive harm not limited to financial matters," and said the application of "proprietary" was correct in this case. Mann said he hopes the ruling "can serve as a precedent in other states confronting this same assault on public universities and their faculty."
Because he knows that the data is cherry picked and manipulated. Everyone knows that, otherwise there would be no hockey stick. The defamation suit would fail. So concealing the maximum amount of information benefits his very weak case.
He'll probably lose the defamation case, in any event. Regardless of what data ultimately is clawed away from him.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I hope the pressure continues.
Schnare said he wants to dig into Mann’s research. “You want to know what are the assumptions? What are the records? We have ‘Climategate’ e-mails to show he can’t even find the data.” He said U-Va. had already spent more than $750,000 in legal costs to keep the e-mails secret.
No one spends three quarters of a million dollars unless there's something very very interesting they don't want seen. The more they fight FOI, the more I want to see what they're hiding.