David Harsanyi explains why federally funded researchers don’t have the same expectation of privacy that privately funded workers do:
In this country, even a global warming denialist with a carbon fetish and bad intentions has the right to see the inner workings of government.
Or at least he should.
When leaked e-mails recently exposed talk of manipulating scientific evidence on global warming, Kevin Trenberth, head of the climate analysis section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, argued that skeptics, and other evil-doers, had cherry-picked and presented his comments out of context.
To rectify this injustice, I sent Trenberth (and NCAR) a Freedom of Information request asking for his e-mail correspondences with other renowned climate scientists in an effort to help contextualize what they’ve been talking about.
Surely the tragically uninformed among us could use some perspective on innocuous Trenberth comments like “we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t” or “we are [nowhere] close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter.”
So, of course, the federally funded organization snapped right to getting the information they were legally required to provide, right? Perhaps in some other parallel universe, but not in this one:
Well, soon after the request was fired off, I was informed by NCAR’s counsel that the organization was, in fact, not a federal agency — since its budget is laundered through the National Science Foundation — thus it is under no obligation to provide information to the public.
“Why don’t you put all your emails online for everyone to see,” Trenberth helpfully suggested to me. “My email is none of your business.”
