Judge Grants Partial Climate FOIA

Judge Orders NASA to Release Climate Change-Related Documents

The controversy started in August 2007, when statistician Stephen McIntyre found an error in NASA’s temperature data sets that he said caused temperatures in the U.S. from the year 2000 onward to be overstated. After posting “his findings on his website ClimateAudit.org,” according to Judge Barbara Rothstein’s decision, McIntyre “emailed them to NASA climate scientists” at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), which quickly “revised values in its temperature data set…[and] did not issue a press release announcing or explaining the corrections.”

Sensing a potential scandal, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) submitted three Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to NASA, two in August 2007 and one in January 2008. After NASA released 2,500 pages of data in response, CEI filed a FOIA lawsuit in federal court in the District of Columbia in 2010.

2,500 pages is easy; just your daily emails for a year, printed out one page a piece gets you there.  This is the old tactic of "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, bury them in bullshit."

Among the materials NASA withheld were two electronic directories referred to as the “Steve” and “alternate cleaning” directories, media inquiries about the data corrections, and two email accounts of Dr. Gavin Schmidt, a NASA scientist who teaches at Columbia University and contributes to a blog called RealClimate.org. Although CEI wanted all that and more, Judge Rothstein ordered NASA to release only the “Steve” directory and one of Dr. Schmidt’s email accounts, finding that the other materials either held no responsive documents or fell within a valid FOIA exemption.

Declining to go further, Rothstein rejected CEI’s contention that that NASA had acted in bad faith. “CEI”s request for discovery is not justified here because CEI has not provided any evidence that the agency acted in bad faith and the outstanding issues of fact do not suggest bad faith on the part of NASA,” Judge Rothstein ruled.

Hmm, maybe we'll get some of the Michael Mann emails that Ken Cuccinelli was trying to get from the other end.