The Reviews into the Climatic Research Unit’s E-mails at the University of East Anglia

Memorandum submitted by David Holland (UEA Reviews 01)

The Independent Climate Change Email Review (ICCER)

I note that your Select Committee is proposing to invite Sir Muir Russell to give evidence before you next month and am writing to you and your colleagues to ask that you look at the disgraceful and deceitful way my submission 1 to the ICCER has been treated. I attach a copy of a letter of complaint that I have sent to Sir Muir Russell.

Despite his assurances and the clear views that your predecessor Committee expressed in relation to the enquiries initiated by the University of East Anglia, the ICCER has been a sham, refusing to openly publish my submission which is a more detailed version of that published 2 by your predecessor Committee (HC 387-II pages EV 115-119).

After advising me that " there would be a significant risk of legal action if your submission is published in whole or in part on the Review website ", the Review has surreptitiously published a speciously edited "version" of it in an Annex to a rebuttal statement 3 by Professor Briffa and Dr Osborn. This is incorrectly indexed on one of the Review’s 16 byzantine evidence pages. It is not possible to determine from the ICCER website when this document was added but its ‘file properties’ indicate it was last modified on the same day as the Final Report of the Review was published, 7 July 2010. Should it be of assistance to you, I have produced an Excel sheet 4 of the ICCER evidence with document dates.

Paragraphs 17 to 33 of the evidence that I presented, with copious documentation, to your predecessor Committee point to a determined effort by climate scientists to suppress information on the IPCC assessment process which the British and other governments has agreed was to be open and transparent.

The plain fact is that information, which the Information Commissioner has ruled 5 should have been disclosed, was wrongly refused by the public authority employers of Professors Mitchell, Hoskins, Allen, Jones and Briffa, who with many other IPCC participants had been advised by the American Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group One, Dr Susan Solomon, to disclose nothing that was not already in the public domain concerning the disputed inclusion of the Wahl and Ammann 2007 paper in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.

Despite his assurance to your predecessor Committee, it appears that Sir Muir Russell delegated the overwhelming majority of the evidence gathering to Professor Geoffrey Boulton, who had worked for UEA for 18 years and has made public presentations of his alarming views on anthropogenic global warming. No one at the UEA appears to have been interviewed individually on the record by the Review team as a whole, or even by more than two of the team, let alone in public. The most serious of all the allegations received by the ICCER, which I made, were pared down to eight paragraphs referred to on page 77 to 79 of the Review Report 6 simply as "The Allegations" and "Evidence in Support of the Allegations". No submission was cited as the source of "The Allegations".

"The Allegations" were rebutted by Briffa and Osborn’s evidence, together with Boulton’s hearsay evidence of what Mitchell and Hoskins said to him in telephone conversations. Briffa and Osborn’s evidence was a written reply to a one page letter from Boulton asking just two specific questions, to which was attached my submission, or part of it. In addition to their "version" of my submission, Briffa and Osborn attached to their evidence an unsigned and unattributed document purporting to be statements provided by IPCC AR5 WGI TSU, prepared in consultation with the former Co-Chair, Susan Solomon and TSU of WGI for the AR4.

Remarkably, this AR5 document confirms for the first time that Jones was directly involved in the improper decision to change the IPCC "in press" deadline and allow the citation of the Wahl and Amman 2007 paper, the validity of which had been disputed by the Reviewer for the United States of America and other Expert Reviewers. This information, and also that contained on the final page of Briffa and Osborn’s evidence, was a significant part of the information that I originally requested two days before Jones asked Professor Mann to delete any AR4 emails he had with Briffa.

Thus, without openly publishing my evidence and using ‘show trial’ standards for the rebuttal evidence, Sir Muir Russell’s Review concluded:

On the specific allegations made against the behaviour of CRU scientists, we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt .

In the 3000 word limit of my submission to your predecessor Committee, I had been unable to include the full detail that I submitted to Russell’s ICCER and I particularly wish to draw your attention to paragraphs 62 and 63 of that submission. With two pieces of evidence disclosed by the ICCER these paragraphs explain the extraordinary efforts made by a group of scientists to keep secret matters which the Principles Governing IPCC Work as well as the Environmental Information Regulation requires to be disclosed.

The email sent by the Technical Support Unit of IPCC Working Group One on 3 July 2006 contained a fabricated reason for changing the deadline by which papers that were to be cited had to be at least "in press" with a "final preprint" available for Expert Reviewers to consider. The original deadline was, quite logically, before the review process started and the guidelines sent out were clear that citations of papers that missed the deadline would be deleted from the text sent out for review. The change to the deadline that allowed Wahl and Amman 2007 to be cited, allowed any paper "in press" two months after the end of the review process to be cited, and many were. This made a nonsense of peer review.

In their evidence to the ICCER Professors Briffa, Osborn Mitchell Hoskins, Jones and AR5 WGI with Dr Susan Solomon all defend the decision and their entitlement to have made it. This is besides the point. What was being concealed by the concerted refusal of UEA, the Met Office, Reading and Oxford Universities was the fabrication in the email that "many" Expert Reviewers had asked for the change. With the release of all the Reviewers’ comments and Lead Authors’ responses in electronic form, it is possible to search all 11,289 of them and I found that only one actually suggested a change and that request was rejected.

In my FoIA request, of 27 May 2008, to which UEA gave the reference FOI_08-31, and which by two days preceded Jones email request that Mann delete any AR4 emails, I specifically asked to be informed of which Expert Reviewers had asked for the "new guidelines". This request is missing from ICCER evidence item 116 7 . The same question was asked of the Met Office, Reading and Oxford.

Page 26 of the ICCER evidence of Briffa disclosed that the decision to send the email of 3 and 4 July 2006 was made by the Coordinating Lead Authors, one of whom was his boss, Jones, who sought to delete "any emails re AR4" two days after I asked for them. In ICCER evidence item 122 8 Mitchell discloses that he missed the start of the meeting at which the decision to change the "in press" deadline was made and was "not aware of the debate about whether the Wahl and Amman paper had or had not met the deadline for the 2nd order draft for chapter 6 until after the event." This may explain the unusual way in which he dealt with my request for information.

Accordingly I am hoping that you might consider some of the appended questions for Sir Muir Russell when he next attends your Committee hearing. I should also add that I will, of course, be willing to appear before you if asked.

David Holland

3 September 2010

A ppendi x

Questions for Sir Muir Russell

a) What was the "legal advice" you received that precluded the Review from publishing in whole or in part on the Review website the evidence you received from Mr Holland?

b) To whom did you distribute Holland’s submission, and was any of it redacted before distribution?

c) Did UEA, any employee of UEA, or anyone else indicate to you that they would take legal action if you published the submission.

d) Given that you had advised Holland that you would not publish his submission in whole or in part, and that on page 125 of your Report you state that you have not published it, how do you account for and justify its selective unattributed publication in the Annex to Briffa and Osborn’s evidence?

e) Briffa and Osborn’s evidence, item 120, posted on the ICCER website, has electronic document properties that state it was last modified on 07/07/2010. When was it first put on your evidence pages and, if it was subsequently modified, why?

f) In paragraph 108 of Holland’s submission he refers to his request of 27 May 2008, which was made two days before Professor Jones asked Professor Mann by email to assist him in deleting the AR4 emails Holland had requested. This was given the reference FOI_08_31 in UEA’s acknowledgement letter of 3 June 2008 but is not mentioned in your Report or listed in your written evidence item 116, "A list of all FOI and EIR requests received relating to the Climatic Research Unit since 2005". Why is this?

g) The electronic document properties of the "list of all FOI and EIR requests" also that state it was last modified on 07/07/2010. When was it first put on your evidence pages and, if it was subsequently modified, why?

h) On what date did you activate the auto answer email at the ICCER website advising "we will no longer be accepting submissions or responding to questions raised?"

i) How can you conclude that the "rigour and honesty as scientist is not in doubt" for individuals that planned to delete lawfully requested information that they now seek to claim concealed no improper breach of the IPCC review process?

j) In your Report, why do you not even give the Internet references of the IPCC Principles and Procedures, which regulate the IPCC assessment process?

k) Why did you take the evidence from the individuals, accused by Holland and others of breaching the IPCC Principles and Procedures under which the IPCC assessments should be carried out, on how to interpret these rules instead of the officials at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, who on behalf of HMG and in conjunction with other governments, wrote and agreed them?

l) Why did Mitchell, Hoskins, Jones, Osborn and Allen, as is described in paragraphs 94 to 117 of Holland’s submission, all act in concert and defy the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 in order to avoid the disclosure of the emailed instruction from WGI TSU that Holland reproduces in paragraphs 60 and 61 and which set out the "new guidelines" for "in press" papers? If, as Jones, Briffa, Osborn, Mitchell and Hoskins now claim, this was not a breach of IPCC Principles and Procedures, why on earth did they spend so much time and effort to suppress it?

m) Given the documentary evidence that exists that Jones, Briffa, Mitchell and Hoskins were collaborating to "resist" Holland’s FoIA requests, how can you justify, in terms of natural justice, using their evidence against Holland without publishing his evidence or giving him the opportunity to respond?

n) What was UEA’s case for using the Ministerial veto in Section 36 of the FoIA to refuse disclosure of what Briffa and Osborn now claim to be entirely proper instructions from the WGI TSU?

o) Why have you not investigated and reported on who or what persuaded UEA’s Information Officer, David Palmer, to reverse his original decision to treat Holland’s original request under the EIR as he had underlined in his first reply that he "must" do?

p) Why were the eight emails that Holland identified in his paragraph 118 together with the email to, and the one from, Briffa, which were appended to Holland’s submission, not disclosed under the subject access request he made under the Data Protection Act?