Our suit, CEI vs. NASA (U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia), followed on the heels of ClimateGate, and a December 2009 Notice of Intent to Sue if NASA did not turn over certain records withheld since CEI sought them in August 2007 and January 2008 requests. That Notice was eleven months ago and, despite NASA offering some documents and admitting — temporarily — that certain others relating to the advocacy site used by NASA scientists, RealClimate.org were “agency records”, NASA then ceased its brief steps to comply with the transparency statute FOIA.

Despite NASA stonewalling CEI has already learned, for example, that NASA does not, contrary to widespread media and pressure group claims, have an independent temperature data set. Instead, as NASA told USA Today in an email, despite its serial, breathless press releases trumpeting some new temperature high, it actually is just a modeling office, which also (for unknown reasons, possibly extra attention and importance, or mere advocacy)  cobbles together some US data from the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) with that of the Climatic Research Unit’s temperature history. You may recall how CRU withdrew its claim to a temperature history data set after ClimateGate led to an admission it actually lost its data.

Specifically, CEI’s FOIA suit seeks documents and emails relating to NASA’s temperature record, which NASA was forced to correct in response to criticism from a leading climate watchdog, Steve McIntyre.  Those corrections destroyed NASA’s stance that U.S. temperatures have been steadily rising in recent years and returned 1934, not 1998, to being the warmest year on record. NASA refuses to give CEI the computer file they used to make these changes, whose title includes “Steve” and “alternate cleaning.”

CEI also seeks emails from NASA scientists using Real Climate.org on official time using official resources, often to advance what NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (its climate activist office) has decided is appropriate public advocacy.

In addition to uncovering the “Steve”/”cleaning” file, a few of the more interesting pieces of evidence expounded upon in CEI’s brief include:

* After CEI filed the FOIA seeking RealClimate emails, administrators at Real Climate deleted all timestamps on all of their postings, making it impossible to show they were made during work hours.  But we kept color copies of the original posts.

* NASA admits that it discovered 3,500 emails on Dr. Schmidt’s NASA computer related to his work on RealClimate but won’t produce them.

* NASA did not ask Dr. Schmidt to look for responsive records until 22 months after we sent them the FOIA and threatened to sue.  It is highly likely relevant emails were destroyed during this period.

* NASA’s delay in responding to CEI’s FOIA requests was extraordinary, far outside its normal or even most egregious examples of delay or non-compliance. For instance:

o   NASA took more than 900 days to produce documents pursuant to CEI’s two 2007 requests.  The agency took more than 700 days to produce records in response to CEI’s 2008 request.  NASA does not explain these delays. FOIA requires that an agency produce responsive records within 20 days. Although agencies rarely meet that deadline, even for “complex” FOIA requests, NASA’s average processing time is under 100 days. In 2008, NASA processed complex requests in 82 days, on average. In 2009, it processed such requests in 89 days, on average.

o   Prompted by congressional inquiries, the NASA Inspector General investigated the delay associated with these FOIA Requests. The Inspector General determined that the delays were caused by “inadequate direction” as to what documents were requested; “inadequate communication between NASA personnel; and “inadequate staffing” at the Goddard FOIA office.  In reality, one of the primary reasons for the delay was that NASA did not inform GISS officials about one of the requests and inexplicably held documents for years instead of producing them on a rolling basis, as requested.

We should argue this within the month. CEI requests the court allow it to proceed to the discovery stage next, examining records and deposing relevant witnesses.

When considering that apparently unacceptable Request for transparency as to what NASA was thinking in agreeing to spend my money that way, our Notice and the alarmists’ reaction in the current “ClimateGate” context, also consider the following relevant excerpt from “Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed” (pp. 104-104). That nice red cover would look great under the tree this year, even if what’s inside the cover is burning the retinas of the global warming industry right about now:

RealAlarmists

Putting a bow on this package of interwoven relationships and back-scratching in pursuit of the elites’ agenda (and largely at taxpayer expense) comes the leading alarmist webblog RealClimate.org. Seemingly established in 2004 to counter, of all things, Michael Crichton’s novel, State of Fear, RealClimate serves as the popular science media’s main touchstone for alarmist memes second only to Gore and his advisor Hansen – and we see here that this is really a distinction without a difference. This outlet is populated by none other than NASA’s resident alarmist mouthpiece – and official spokesman for Hansen’s GISS shop – Gavin Schmidt. Although RealClimate touts the unpaid nature of their writers’ work, the time-stamps on Schmidt’s often highly personal blog posts make quite clear that these actually come on the taxpayer dime, as well. Other RealClimate writers include “Hockey Stick” Mann and Hockey Stick-related Casper Amman.

It turns out that Realclimate.org is owned by an outfit that is in essence a non-profit public relations firm called Environmental Media Services (EMS), “dedicated to expanding media coverage of critical environmental and public health issues”, whose Pittsburgh office houses the RealClimate server.[1] ActivistCash.com describes EMS as “the communications arm of leftist public relations firm Fenton Communications.”[2]

EMA’s listed registrant, Betsy Ensley, engages in the objective, non-partisan pursuit of “manag[ing] BushGreenwatch.org, a joint EMS-MoveOn.org public awareness website”.[3] She also apparently ran WomenAgainstBush.org, and former Harvard string theorist (and still-hilarious climate blogger) Lubos Motl notes that when Ensley was campaigning against John Ashcroft her secretary was Kalee Kreider, now Al Gore’s spokesperson.[4] MoveOn is of course in part a George Soros venture, and attentive climate realists recall the kafuffle over Soros supporting Hansen’s alarmism.[5]

Motl describes EMS as “primarily an organization to pay for junk science about food and beverages, often hired by food companies to damage their competitors”.[6] This is known as “black marketing.”[7]

This is not inconsistent with my own experience with Fenton, which I first encountered nearly two decades ago. Then, they were representing a “green” lawn care products company in a legislative effort to craft new federal laws creating a secure place in a market otherwise dominated by those whose products attain prominence through competition. This is a modus operandi that will sound very familiar by the time you finish this book. Fenton has also been associated with every questionable campaign from chasing Alar off the shelves by leveraging weepy celebrities and fear tactics to promoting Mother Sheehan’s tour.[8]

As critics note, the idea that RealClimate is just a bunch of unpaid “real scientists” is risible, given their methods of argumentation are often little more than smear, ridicule, cherry- picking science, and pronouncing themselves and their exclusive little climate clique as only the few “qualified’ to have an opinion on man-made global warming. RealClimate’s members, like Andrew Dessler of Grist and writers for the Soros-backed Climate Progress, perpetrate a unique form of “qualification thuggery” by which anyone skeptical of their agenda are unworthy to comment, typically because they skeptic does not affiliate with the UN IPCC. When the skeptic is an IPCC author or reviewer, well he’s still unqualified. And “mere physicists” such as Freeman Dyson, or chemists, or economists, are also unqualified, but only when they disagree. After all, Dessler is a chemist, and the IPCC’s “chief scientist” is no such thing at all, as you’ll see.

Absent agreement, this unholy alliance of activists, Big Science and other vested interests responds so viciously to even the whiff of dissent that it is impossible to not wonder what it is they are afraid of.

[2] http://www.activistcash.com/organization_overview.cfm/oid/110.

[3] http://www.zoominfo.com/Search/PersonDetail.aspx?PersonID=326603649

[4] Lobos Motl, “Bonus: Funding of RealClimate.org”, The Reference Frame”, April 7, 2008, http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/04/green-trolls-edit-wmo-bbc-reports.html.

[5] See, e.g., Noel Sheppard, “NASA’s Hansen Claims He’s Being ‘Swift-boated’ by Critics”, NewsBusters, September 28, 2007, http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/09/28/nasa-s-james-hansen-claims-he-s-being-swift-boated-critics.

[6] Motl, ”Bonus: Funding of RealClimate.org.”

[7] See discussion also at http://www.activistcash.com/organization_overview.cfm/oid/110.

[8] See Horner, “Politically Incorrect Guide to global Warming and Environmentalism”, pp xv-xvi.