Back in the day when John Cook claimed he was too busy to release the data of his flawed consensus study but had time enough to photoshop pictures of me, I filed a request to see what U Queensland employees were writing about me.

Here are the files:
UQ decision
UQ schedule
Emails by Cook
Emails by Hoegh-Guldberg
Emails by Lu
Emails by Hoj
UQ appeal
OIC preliminary decision
OIC final decision

Most of the material is redacted. I appealed, and appealed, and appealed again, but to no avail. U Queensland initially refused access to the rest of the material partly because I would be a meanie. This was upheld by internal review, and an argument in the preliminary ruling of the Information Commissioner. When I pointed out (with a little help from Steve McIntyre) that IPA 2009 explicitly excludes the motives and morality of the applicant as grounds for refusing access, the Information Commissioner changed her reasoning but not her ruling.

Although the links between SkS and U Queensland are plain to see, and although U Queensland comes to defense of SkS when needed, SkS Forum does not falls under U Queensland for the purposes of freedom of information legislation.

The released material is not that exciting. We learn that the vice-chancellor is worried about another scandal. We learn that Ove Hoegh-Guldberg is fully behind Cook in this, as he was with that other paper.

The only really interesting bit is Cook's email of 31 Jul 2013, in which he wrote
Cook contradicted himself almost a year later, when he wrote
These statements cannot both be true. Shollenberger's data show that time stamps were indeed collected.

We now also know why Cook wants us to think that time stamps are not there. Not only do they reveal the care taken in collecting the data -- 765 ratings in 72 hours -- but they also show that Cook and co collected data, analyzed them, and went back to collect more data. The first sample and the second sample show different results. This alone invalidates the entire study.