Sparks: Climate scientists face deluge of public-records requests about fossil-fuel studies

Thirty petitions arrive at the university door in two years, each one asking politely for the letters and the notes, and the clerks who must answer them have no mules and no mountains and no end to the correspondence.

The request for documents is itself a kind of weather, generated by many small motions that no single hand directs, and the scientist who fears it as a deliberate storm has mistaken an aggregate for an author.

A researcher spends forty hours answering a records request that took four hours to write, and the wage for those forty hours comes out of the same grant that pays for the next measurement, which is the whole trick and nobody says it plainly.

The requests are counted as thirty, but the number that matters is the isotherm connecting them: the same handful of legal templates, the same funders, the same years, drawn across thirty different universities as one line.

Thirty requests since 2024 is a catalogue, not a finding, and until someone records who filed each one, under what statute, and with what counsel, the count tells us more about the filing than about the science.

They demand the raw data as proof of rigour, then cite the scientist's inability to produce it in the format they invented as evidence she was never rigorous to begin with - a circle so tidy it would be admirable if it were not aimed at silencing half the field.

A handful of filers generate thirty requests, thirty requests generate hundreds of hours, hundreds of hours generate one scientist's silence, and I confess I do not understand why the many comply with the few.

How fortunate we are to live in the best of all possible worlds, where a citizen may demand a professor's emails in the name of transparency, and the professor may spend her summer producing them in the name of the same, and everyone agrees the arrangement is enlightened.

They speak of the public's right to know as though it were a pure and equal thing, and I observe that the right is being exercised against the scientist in her office and not against the funder in his, and only one of these has been asked to explain herself this year.

You do not fight a records request by arguing with it in the open; you build the archive before it comes, you know which drawer holds what, and you never lose a passenger to a subpoena you saw three months out.

'In the interest of transparency,' writes the requester, and in that phrase the entire campaign has already confessed itself, for transparency directed at one party and never at the other is not transparency but a searchlight with a hand on the switch.