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John Quiggin 
If you are going to slander scientists with their “seems to be clear evidence” of obstructing an FOI – then you need to tell others to stop being pedantic and start explaining yourself.
I’ve already done both. I’ve told you to stop being pedantic. And I’ve explained myself by saying that if the leak represents real emails then it seems there is clear evidence.
What “clear” evidence?
It is clear, and well reported, that Phil Jones has been subject to numerous FOI requests from conspiracy theorists. It has also been clearly reported (over the last 5 years, at least) that Phil Jones (rightly) views these conspiracy theorists with a large degree of contempt, and has complained in the press many times about the barrage of FOI that he receives.
It is also clear that he did not believe he was obliged to pass on private body IPCC emails – particularly when he was well aware that every word in these emails would be attempted to be twisted against him by conspiracy theorists.
Please show me your evidence that clearly demonstrates anything other than the above. You have not provided any evidence whatsoever. Quite clearly. Yet you continue to slander.
Take your general points about FOI requests Peter T but you might like to read the actual FOI response letter here- http://camirror.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/test/
I’d have to say that doesn’t gel with your statement- ‘On the issue of open data – all the basic data is out there.’ It has all the hallmarks of an in house boys club keeping secrets among themselves, secrets I might add that are really data publicly paid for and should rightly be in the public domain. When it’s pointed out that earlier data was treated as such then it’s um, err we made an honest mistake and have to ‘protect our sources’ so to speak.
As I said above this is not a good look and along with the accompanying emails which aren’t being refuted and what looks like some hasty electronic ‘shredding’ going down, this could well be an Abhu Graib moment that will give many in the science community the shock horrors. Certainly not fatal to the AGW beacon of light cause, but nevertheless extremely unhelpful. AGW fans ought to be very circumspect about pooh poohing this as just a storm in a teacup. ‘Tricks’ with data and ‘tricksy’ answers to pertinent questions and reasonable requests don’t go down well with Joe Public either, as an SA Premier is finding out to his regret right now. I’d caution against defending the indefensible here and grimace and bear the fallout from the fleas of association. There’s a whistle blower at work here and it’s time we all had a good hard look at what’s being whistled about.
In principle, I agree.
But….. in many cases, it is clear that the requests for data are simply a political weapon to attack scientists, not an honest attempt to understand the work. For example, Steven McIntyre’s request for Briffa’s Yamal data.
And… many of requests for data and methods aren’t simple requests for data and methods. They include demands for all of the working etc. As somebody who comes from a synthetic chemistry/material science background where the level of detail in reported data and methods is very often far far less, these demands strike me as completely over the top.
McIntryre eventually got the methods and data he spent so long requesting and was subsequently very critical of the conclusions that Briffa made. He did not launch a personalised attach on Briffa (although clearly many of the commenters on his blog attempted to). Rather he spend his time analysing the data and methods used and exposing weaknesses.
If methods and data are not to be shared with people who are keen to detect weaknesses then it is a very limited form of sharing. Not exactly robust. A bit like only being willing to debate people that already agree with you.
The underlying data for climate change is in the public domain. Obviously some IP related data isn’t, but this has nothing to do with Terje’s strawman critique, nor with disproving climate change.
Terje – if you can point to any underlying data that is missing (from the public domain) in explaining the latest IPCC report and any of its recommendations – can you please highlight this. thanks.
@TerjeP (say tay-a)
Sorry Terje, but McIntyre has played you like a pack of cards.
After Mc asked for the data, he was told that it was the property of the Russians who collected it. The Russian’s supply him the data in 2004. Rather than doing something with this data, he has been playing his stupid game of demanding the data from Briffa despite knowing a) that Briffa can’t give it too him without violating an agreement with the owner and b) already has a copy.
It’s this sort of dishonest game playing that makes me stop paying attention to anything Mc says that isn’t published in the peer reviewed literature.
Iain – this is what I said earlier.
Now if the leaked emails are accurate then I think my above statement is supported by the following leaked email:-
@TerjeP (say tay-a)
Surely a serious scientist doesn’t have to bother with every request, especially from someone who starts with his conclusion rather than using evidence to arrive at the conclusion. I imagine that serious scientists are rather busy dealing with requests from other serious scientists, and requests from AGW deniers are not at the top of their to do list. Probably, researchers who study evolution do not drop everything when they get a request from a creationist (or intelligent designer) and historians studying the holocaust do not rush to answer requests from people like David Irving.
Should they be criticized as well?
So if Briffa could not release the data how come Briffa eventally released the data?
In any case I think you are misreprenting the situation. The question was always about how Briffa got the results he got from the Yamal data set. Obviously it entailed selective use of the data. However until the exact data used by Briffa in his temperature reconstruction was released there was no ability to examine his selection process.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7142
Freelander – there is a difference between not having the time or inclination to help a sceptic and willfully taking time out to obstruct a sceptic and to ask others to help in the endeavour.
He didn’t. He published another paper with the owner of the data as a co-author. The data was officially released then. Of course, Mc already had that data for the previous five years – he just lead you to believe that he didn’t have it.
Looking forward to reading Mc’s peer reviewed paper showing us how Yamal should be done. Should be good, seeing he has had five years to write it.
Hey guys,
Just read some interesting emails. Good luck with the climate tax.
I have a question for JQ or others here who are familiar with the ETS. There is an Age article about the ETS by Ken Davidson, critical of it because it claims it will be ineffectual:
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/this-etslite-deserves-to-be-rejected-20091122-isr0.html
The main thrust is that the ETS relies on trading of CDM permits which are themselves poorly audited. Hence an ETS does not require us to actually reduce emissions (we can just expand and buy more permits) while the permits don’t guarantee any reduction/genuine credit.
If so I find this a major concern. I am not a CC skeptic and agree something needs to be done. At first I would have preferred a simple carbon tax and the money used to fund needed investment. But I was persuaded by arguments of JQ and others that a carbon tax does not guarantee any reduction in emissions whereas an ETS does. However it does seem logical that, if the creedit auditing is inadequate, an ETS doesn’t guarantee a reeduction either, and there is not even any new investmetn in the required alternative technology. What are others views?
I have had one final concern about an ETS for some time – do gooders. I have sometimes suspected that designers of an ETS were motivated by solving two problems – climate change and third world poverty. Credits to CDM schemes in poor countries could help with both. But I am wary of such intents. Poor countries are invariably the most corrupt and attempts to externally reform them are often failures. Meanwhile we may compromise the CC response. Is this concern valid?
Finally, can anyone who has read it confirm that, unde the proposed Australian ETS, the amount of Australian emissions will be capped to the stated levels? I would be most concerned if the coal industry could expand any further here.
@Peter T
Thanks Peter T, that’s pretty much as I thought – there has to be some judgement made by the parties as to what may be in scope and what isn’t.
As an aside, it has been pointed out that the CRU staff in question are not government employees – I haven’t as yet verified that.
In general, it appears that some of the earliest emails doing the rounds have been trimmed by the copiers, the Phil Jones one concerning “hiding the decline” in particular. Over at RealClimate the post by Llama Chees has the details. I cannot verify what Llama Cheese says because I’m not going to stick my head and neck into that can of worms to check, to mix a metaphor. No doubt someone else here can verify or shoot down.
@Donald Oats
Should be “Llama Cheese”, and I sincerely hope that is a pseudonym.
@Donald Oats
To Don and others who are now here trying to shake some sense into the fruit loops that want to take this hack beat up and run with it…much like the Telegraph (and we know how much real news they are interested in – the news about the hack is placed next to a double page spread on girl fights in town)
I have a suggestion. Give the fruit loops less O2 and more of what they want. CO2. Especially Terje who appears to have fallen victim to monumental hyperbolic overreaction last night.
Don
Thanks for that excellent link. Llama Cheese does an excellent job debunking the stolen emails scam. Personally though, I have not had any doubts about the CC science for 15 years. I tink inability to accept it is a sign of declining mental flexibility on the part of the critics, most of whom are old men.
@Socrates
1. I don’t think intent is measurable and in the end what is salient is whether the measures produce adequate public goods to form rational policy.
In theory, the objection is valid, but in practice it depends on how CDM schemes are measured, against what caps, and in what specific programs. A program that for example, used local labour to erect a wind turbine, solar panels, solar cookers, and small scale pumped hydro in a village and which allows the village to stop burning cow dung in their huts and to pump and purify water, using largely local labour and materiel delivers benefits in kind, regardless of whether the village chief is corrupt.
1) People might study the Data Quality Act, and how it is employed to make it as difficult as possible to pass environmental regulations by allowing demands for so much paperwork that it is hrd to get anything reasonable done. Imagine that in law:
a) There was no bond on the number of appeals.
b) It was effectively free to demand masses of expensie work on every appeal.
2) This is the same tactic, but used versus a few indiviual researchers.
Some people seem to think that is it required and appropriate for a Canadian mining guy to set the research agendas and workloads for researchers in the UK and USA. Maye he can be3 convinced to chase CSIRO the same way, and I’m sure people inOzwiul lbe pleased to spend more money to satisfy every demand.
A very good question Socrates #16. I’m agnostic on AGW but not on our need to address peak oil and the ability of fossil fuels to convert our natural environment to our wants. However I like the people and articles Davidson refers to am an avowed skeptic of ETS to address any of these problems and if the exposure of EAU climate change ‘scientists’ scuppers an ETS, so much the better for mine. Basically ETS is theoretically cute but a can of practical worms. Hasn’t worked so far and is really just more derivatives credit creation rocket fuel for the Goldman Sachs of the world to drive a bus through.
The killer for me is-
“Offsets are an imaginary commodity created by deducing what you hope happens from what you guess would have happened.”
It’s easily seen in the companies that come around and change your light globes and shower heads (electric HWS only) do a quick average calc of the CO2 thereby ‘saved’ and nick off with an instant REC forever more. The homeowner can change the shower heads back the next day and fill the ceilings with downlights but that property right remains to be traded forever more. Same with solar to grid schemes and RECS. They calc average power/CO2 saved. In my case of a 2.1kw maxm system it’s about 10kw average per day over the year’s seasons, but on a wet overcast day it might only put out 150-200W at midday. What’s my brown coal power station up to then and in waiting mode you may well ask. Then there’s the counterproductive incentive of schemes palm oil for diesel and corn for ethanol, etc, as well as counting all the CO2 credit creation that would have occurred anyway eg Hydro and methane from rubbish tips, etc.
In summary I guess I’d ask you to answer the question to ETS or not to ETS like this- Knowing what you know now about all the water under the bridge with the MDB, would you vote yes today for public servants and pollies to hand out and police the right amount of water rights to get the balance between environmental and human use just right? My answer is in their dreams I would, but I can easily see how resource taxing that water a few cents a kilolitre could achieve exactly that today. As far as I’m concerned you tax the things you want less use of (eg resources and natural environment) and don’t tax things you want more of(eg human labour and ingenuity) with as administratively clear, simple and neutral means as possible. To do that you can start from first principles with the premise that if AGW is THE greatest threat of all, you have that means to raise ALL appropriate taxation. It is the maximum price effect you can have with negligible admin. Then you ask yourself – Is or should THAT be it?
Notice that Oz ETS fans can’t even begin to get their heads around such a maximum theoretical price effect. They’re too busy ringing up Goldman Sachs or checking the Aussie dollar for you. Bah, humbug!
Fran
I don’t mean to imply an objection to helping the third world. But my concern is that I often think that policy makers who try to solve two problems at once wind up failing to fix either. My concern is not only theoretical. Apart from Davidson’s article I have read several reports by environmental groups concerned about the CDM initiative and its poor administration. Thus your example is what we would all like to see. But if the village chief also is ripping down all the local rain forest to sell off to a logging company and the net effect is not counted, then neither we nor the village are better off. Hence in practice it matters a lot whether or not the village chief is corrupt.
A global CPRS would vastly increase the sums being traded for carbon credits. It therefore also increases the potential (ill-gotten) gains from such corruption. In my view it would be niave to think we will be better at regulating a carbon market than we have been regulating financial markets. A market failure comparable in size to that which has recently occurred in Wall Street would leave us in a perilous position. For a global carbon market to work, we need a global carbon regulator with teeth and the motivation to act with integrity. (I was never a fan of that self-regulating markets garbage.)
Aternatively I am becoming increasingly skeptical of the view that it is too hard to regulate a carbon tax system. Why can’t we just set GHG reduction targets for each country, leave them to tax and reduce their emissions internally, and assess progress and place tariffs on those who fail to do so? In effect it could work similarly to how the WTO works now.
I admit I am not expert on these things so happy to be proven wrong if someone has links to a good analysis of the options that shows why an ETS works best.
@John Mashey
Thanks for reminding me of it, John; I had forgotten about it after the change of President in the USA. It would be instructive to see just how much time is consumed in addressing the FOI requests of McIntyre et al, and even more instructive to discover which financial donors ended up effectively paying for the cost of doing it. Did the UEA have to cover the cost?
The most frustrating thing is once again climate science takes a backseat to politics.
On a different note, some time ago I posted here that I thought the various delusorati were hooking up and getting more coordinated. Carter, Plimer, McKinninmonth, Evans, Nova, McLean, Moore, and several others I’m too tired to chase up, seem to hit the newspaper letters pages straight away when there is a big story or an opinion piece by one of the so-called sceptics. Furthermore, Carter and Plimer seem to have the travelbug, giving speeches to all and sundry, here and O/S. They are nowhere near as ad-hoc in their pronouncements as they were three or four years ago.
Oh yes Don – some of the delusorati are clearly being handsomely rewarded either by their unseemly organisations or by a sensation hungry or complicit media or both. It is tiring.
Clearly, they are being funded to spread the ‘truth’. I don’t doubt they believe their nonsense but someone is sprinkling funds over them. Candidates would be looney ‘think tanks’, wealthy deniers, and corporate interests.
Regarding the delusorati (I like that term) it was pointed out that Plimer is still a director of several mining companies and recieves director’s fees from them. I don’t know if anyone is paying him directly to do his crusade for anti-science, but he definitely has a financial interest via the directorships.
I also agree though, that the current anti-climate science campaign appears to be funded if not organised. A round of travel, lectures, hiring halls and media releases all costs money. The hacking of a university server required someone to know where the server was, have the skill to hack it, time to search the stolen material, and then connections to distribute the selected emails. Who has the time and resources to do that on their own?
When I was at school, my maths teacher told the story of the schoolboy who was asked to add up the numbers 1 to 100. The rest of the class started 1+2+3+4+… but the smart kid said 100+1=101, 99+2=101, 98+3=101, “Hey this is easy”
My maths teacher described it as “a trick”. Practitioners of maths and science often use the expression “a trick” to describe an ingenious way to save time and effort.
I am very disappointed to learn that this terminology has invalidated both the rules of elementary arithmetic and the law of conservation of energy.
Humm, money… Director fees… Even better, money for nothing. Where do I sign up to become part of the delusorati?
@Socrates
I perfectly well take your point. As someone who has in past years, been involved in development projects in Africa, I have something of a sense of these things. An issue has arisen for example over the treatment of “flaring”. Oil wells are not supposed to flare gases such as CH4 which are by-products of oil harvest. This best-practice standard predates the CDM, but now it seems that capturing the CH4 and using it to generate power will fit the criteria for CDM.
While this makes sense, in a way it really is rewarding the company for something it should do as a matter of social responsibility bearing the full cost itself and being assessed for its footprint in the same way as any organisation should rather than double-dipping.
Consistent and rational accounting practice will be necessary if we are to get this right. If good mitigation can also serve social equity then this is especially good and so I don’t mind if the cost of doing things this way is a little greater than a more tightly focused GHG program. Fairly obviously, the bulk of the existing problem is the consequence of the disproportionate exploitation of the commons by the developed world, which is self-evidently a beneficiary of this practice, which, until now, has encouraged the developing world to ape its excesses. We can afford to pay because we benefited from causing the problem and those who are less able to pay are already disadvantaged. Finally, we pay lipservice to equity and if the biosphere is protected we first worlders benefit too.
In theory, it is perfectly possible to regulate a carbon tax system effectively. In practice, all tax systems are prey to political porkbarrelling, and the kinds of NTB malarkey one sees attached to trade agreements. If you look at the current ETS negotiations, and imagine what they’d be like every election and on a world scale, you can get a sense of this. Creating a tradeable asset restrains fiddling with the system because powerful interest holders have a stake in the system not being rorted that they don’t have when all that is being discussed is taxes and rebates. If you have overpurchased emissions certificates, you won’t want anything being done to lessen their value — including allowing a regime that allows polluters to get sweetheart deals. You’d prefer stiffer targets that you can meet with the certificates you hold but your business rivals don’t. And if you can trade these certificates offshore, then they become even more valuable. You can’t do that with taxes.
In essence, a good ETS wedges business and since business contains the bulk of the enemies of mitigation, this is a good group to wedge.
One need not conclude a cross-jurisdictional ETS with a sovereign power of course. Conceivably, companies and organisations could trade these certificates privately if they fell within a structure recognised by an issuing authority, operating perhaps, within WTO guidelines. Again, this is not something easily done through a tax regime.
One attractive feature of the ‘property right’ approach of ETS is that rights holders would not like non-rights holders to be cheating, that is, infringing on their rights. Although there can be the same problem with non-tax paying, the attitude doesn’t seem the same.
Fran
Thanks very much for your reply. Your point about the susceptibility of tax systems to distortion is sadly true. In that case there is no alternative not open to manipulation by the corrupt. As you say, whatever system is put in place will require monitoring and auditing and that is not a valid criticism of an ETS, unless you plan to do nothing (and I don’t).
Also your comment that we don’t have to enter into an ETS with any particular country is useful. Obviously this can become a stick/carrott to encourage compliance.
@Freelander
The reason being that the cost of free riders in any system is borne by the entire class on paying riders so each person cheated only bears a small portion of the cost, whereas the cost of subverting assets is borne heavily by property holders. That is of course the very reason why we have seen such a determined campaign by the big polluters to stymie action that would subvert the value of their assets by imposing a cost on their emission of its post-combustion effluent.
Imagine if someone proposed to relieve the current deficit by printing $AUS30 billion dollars. Everyone holding Aussie dollars or who had given credit to someone who would pay them in Aussie dollars would be scandalised, because suddenly, each would be worth less.
Everyone holding the currency asset has a stake in fiscal rectitude by the issuing authority. It’s exactly the same with real property and stocks and other assets.
@Fran Barlow
That’s true although if you are not paying an emission tax as well as there being a cost to all other taxpayers there is a special penalty to emitters paying their emission tax because you are competing with them, in this way it is relatively similar to the property rights case but not seen as similar by the poluters.
@Alan
Indeed: Over on RealClimate I’ve made the point here andhere that it is used in active research as well, as have several others. The MSM prefer the dictionary definition of trick, unfortunately.
This actually brings up a serious point, concerning climate science “glasnost”. If all emails are open to scrutiny of anyone with 10pounds (AFAIK) and a properly filled FOI form, there is a big problem with both the mis-interpretation of the intended meaning of English words that are part of the scientific language, and with handy stock-in-trade expressions/words. The word “trick” is one such example, and there will be oodles of other cases. I guess taking each case at a time and demonstrating its definition in a relevant place – eg medical science dictionary for medical terms, or showing that its use is widespread in the relevant scientific literature.
My prediction is that affected scientists are going to need to either drop such ambiguous terms from email and other FOI-able documents, or draw a line in the sand and say this is not good enough. Get the grant bodies and financiers involved – after all, its their money being spent; surely they want the scientists to work efficiently, without being weighed down by future concern over the interpretation of common science-community-words and the like.
Thinking about the delusorati and their typical political profile, here is one political voice on climate change they will find hard to deny. Margaret Thatcher was a chemistry graduate before law and politics. She recognised the danger of global warming due to CO2 and other gases in 1988!! Here is a link to her speech to the Royal Society at the time:
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=107346
I like this quote on eliminating airborne pollution:
“Even though this kind of action may cost a lot, I believe it to be money well and necessarily spent because the health of the economy and the health of our environment are totally dependent upon each other.”
@Socrates
[Thatcher quote]
That’s true enough, and I accept tjhe reasoning, but …
Thatcher’s motivation was twofold:
1. Trident, and the need for Pu239 for those warheads which could only come through nuclear power
2. 1974 and the humiliation for Heath and the need to smash the powerful coal miners union by retooling with nuclear.
As a former Secretary of Education, Margaret (“milk snatcher”) Thatcher felt that having a scientific concern could lift her standing abroad, at least, that’s how Crispin Tickell, a UK Ambassador to the UN who was personally, as far as can be told, genuinely sold on AGW (see for example: Climatic Change and World Affairs, 1977, sold it to her. She was the one who set up the Hadley Centre.
As bureaucratic intrigue goes, Tickell’s salemanship is probably one of the unsung stories, since these days he hardly rates a mention in dispatches and yet probably did as much as any single person who is currently not a celebrity to put the world on the path to doing something effective to deal with the problem — and that with the most unlikely of all figures to work with — possibly the most reactionary PM in the history of 20th century Britain. Big ups to him, as Ali G would say.
I kind of like it that he was involved with the Gaia Society, not because I endorse such metaphysical nonsense but because it annoys the hell out of the filth merchants that the vehicle for gaia was their hero, Thatcher herself. Years later, (1992) she backpedalled furiously, moaning about environmentalism in much the terms that Minchin did in the “fruit loops” thread, which served only to complete her ignominous departure from politics.
Slight amendment:
Trident, and the need for Pu239 for those warheads which could only come through nuclear power
A dedicated reactor would be a cheaper and quicker route to this, but nuclear power also served objective 2, which was at least as important to her, given the events of 1984-5.
Fran
I am absolutely NOT a fan of Thatcher, but I think that is too harsh, and presupposes motives that don’t fit chronologically. By 1988 the coal miner’s strike had ended three years earlier (1985) with victory to Thatcher. Thatcher also was concerned about CFCs, pushed for signing of the Montreal protocol, and increased environmental funding generally. By all means follow the link and read the whole text.
Further to the above, if there was a political motive for Thatcher, I think it suited her psychologically to look down her nose at Labor as “luddites” who were ignorant of science. She liked being a snob.
@Socrates
That’s true but the fact remains that she had alreadey decided, in 1981, to augment UK nuclear capacity and Trident and by 1988 she had a cause to which she could attach it.
Donald – the Phil Jones email in which he talks of hiding the decline is embarrassing and good for headlines but not the most concerning revelation in this saga. The deliberate attempts to obstruct, as opposed to ignore, sceptics is the most concerning thing. If nothing else this saga should lead to greater transparency and openness. Those that support science should have nothing to fear from either.
On a slightly separate note I’m surprised to see those that suddenly think FOI is a bad idea.
Terje has gone from “seemingly clear evidence” of obstructing an FOI — to “deliberate attempts to obstruct skeptics”.
He got a Fail on the first point, the only evidence he provided was of an email that expressed frustration at FOI and a “thought” about deleting files.
I really thought he would post the actual email requesting deleting files. The emails requested to be deleted were private body IPCC related emails (which Phil Jones went out of his way to clarify with the FOI office that they were not part of FOI). Either way Terje’s claim for “seemingly clear evidence of obstructing an FOI” is zero (Fail).
His second point: “deliberate attempts to obstruct skeptics” obviously gets a Pass.
He also gets a Pass for making the observation “I do however think that people that publish acadamic papers should make available to critics their underlying data and methods.”
I note, however, that he failed to answer the question:
“Terje – if you can point to any underlying data that is missing (from the public domain) in explaining the latest IPCC report and any of its recommendations – can you please highlight this. thanks.”
Well done Terje. Keep throwing up obvious points. Keep making slanderous allegations without any evidence whatsoever. Keep avoiding questions. Keep adding to the “debate”.
Iain – sorry for being such a failure. It must be hard for you having to slum it with the likes of me. I’ll try and breath less of your air.
Terje – what “clear evidence” do you provide for your slander?
You haven’t provided any clear evidence that shows obstruction of an FOI. Yet you will slander scientists based on stolen emails. I’m sorry if you get defensive about me pointing out the logical flaws in your comments.
If you can’t provide reasoned logic and thinking (other than cutting and pasting an email that, quite honestly, doesn’t prove anything), then how can we have a discussion with you?
What section of the email, that you provided, do you think allows you to slander the scientist concerned?
In my view Terje has no evidence iain – but perhaps he cannot realise that, in which case arguing is a waste of time. Alternatively he does realise that – and arguing is still a waste of time. This is the general conclusion I have reached about most of the ‘self-styled’ skeptics who continue with their endless rehashes of obvious and proven rubbish. I believe that once you realise someone is going round and round without ever understanding or acknowledging clear argument it is time to move on to other issues. Blogs all over the net have been hijacked by this sort of shenanigans which to me are of a kind with vexatious applications for FOI
Iain – If you wish to ignore or twist what I have stated already or if you wish to insist that black is white then I’m not sure how I can help you in terms of logic. What I have stated is on record in the comments above and I don’t feel any need to amend anything I’ve said. You have to make up your own mind which you seem to have done.
The public display of the content of these emails is what is damaging to reputations, not my commentary on them. If you don’t see these emails as damaging peoples reputations then I have done no harm in quoting them to you. You are free to make your own judgements. I don’t feel obligated to convince you.
The email expresses frustration at FOI and a “thought” about deleting files.
This is completely different to “evidence for obstructing an FOI”.
I understand any written threat or instruction to delete an email is cringe-worthy. But how can someone slander someone (as obstructing FOI) with such little evidence? I honestly don’t understand it. I just obstructing FOI is such a big call – you really do need to have your legal and evidential ducks in a row to make it. And, so far, Terje’s ducks aren’t lined up.
note iain how terje has changed his complaint – it appears he is now just saying the emails damage people’s reputations – quite different, and milder, than the earlier claim of “deliberate attempts to obstruct”. Is this tactic deliberate or something else? I do not know, however I have seen this tactic used many times before on the web.