We’ll see how badly they want to protect these emails, and if they rise to Mannian UVa protection level seven.

Over the last couple of days, CEI’s Chris Horner has been emailing me news of a FOIA request he made earlier in the year. The FOI request is for correspondence between NOAA’s Dr. Thomas Peterson and Thomas Stocker, the head of the IPCC Working Group 1. It is hoped that this correspondence might get him some information on the IPCC secret letter sent by Stocker to all of the IPCC lead authors right after Climategate:

We have the announcement above, but not the attachment. The attachment is apparently secret since nobody wants to talk about it or even acknowledge its existence.

Steve McIntyre wrote an eviscerating essay about the secret letter circulated by the IPCC to UEA/CRU, which they are refusing to divulge, because:

there would be an adverse effect on international relations between IPCC WG1 and academic institutions within the United Kingdom because it would force is to reconsider our working arrangements with those experts who have been selected for an active role in WG1 AR5 from your institution and others in the UK”.

McIntyre writes:

On Feb 26, 2010, as part of their first response to Climategate, Thomas Stocker, a Climategate correspondent of Phil Jones and by then Co-Chair of AR5 WG1, sent a still secret letter to all WG4 Lead Authors, Coordinating Lead Authors and Review Editors under the letterhead of WG1, purporting, it seems, to represent the parent IPCC organization. The existence of this secret email came to light as a result of David Holland’s persistence in trying to cut through IPCC authoritarianism and secrecy. After learning of its existence, David submitted an FOI request, which has been refused, and which is now under appeal at the Tribunal.

What’s happened is that NOAA has not responded with a refusal, documents, or even replied to acknowledge Horner’s request. That’s a legal no-no.

Horner, an attorney skilled in such matters, said this is something called “constructive refusal”, and it throws opens the door for an immediate lawsuit, and he’s taking advantage of it.

Horner says in his email:

We will soon learn out how badly the global warming establishment wants to fight to keep this, and similar public records, from the public. Will NOAA disregard the caviling from usual suspects and promptly move to produce the record, which should take mere minutes? Or will it heed the calls and hunker down, risking a certain judicial order affirming what an inspector general has already concluded. IPCC-related records in the possession of government employees (or accessible by them, now that we know about third-party servers established to dodge FOI laws), are indeed agency records subject to release to the taxpayers who underwrite the IPCC enterprise.