Dear University of Auckland,

Please provide any records (including but not limited to internal/external: documents, emails, notes, minutes, text messages, or social media messages) mentioning scientists Dr Ned Nikolov and/or Dr Karl Zeller and/or Dr Roy Spencer as mentioned in the links below.

For context - so that you can correctly identify the individuals - some links relevant to their work are mentioned in the links below.
1) 2017 Peer Reviewed and Published Paper Describing How Earth's Long Term Average Temperature can be estimated from NASA data on other planets without referencing the composition of Earth's atmosphere. That is, the finding is that CO2 does not have an impact on the long term average temperature of Earth.
https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/...

2) Blog reply by Ned Nikolov in response to a critique by Dr Roy Spencer
https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2019/01/...

Yours faithfully,

Chris Johnston

Dear Rebecca Ewert,

Thanks for the reply.

Consultation

UoA is legally required to consult with the requester about the OIA response before making precipitous judgments.

The UoA has not done this.

Other responses to this identical OIA have resulted in successful responses - despite these individuals not being within the employment of the organisations concerned.

A way forward may be for numerical counts of documents that meet certain keywords, but I would need to understand which systems were easy/hard for UoA and also the numbers of documents that you are returning from your initial searches.

Please provide some initial counts from your various systems about the number of records being returned. Where you have used additional keywords to help you identify documents that are highly likely to mean that these Climate scientists are being correctly identified please include this as well.

We all have an interest in ensuring that these types of OIA requests can be dealt with in an efficient way that is not administratively onerous.

Capability

in the meantime the fact that this appears to be an onerous task ("substantial collation or research") for the UoA concerns me as it may indicate that the organisation is not able to fulfill its obligations under the Public Records Act and the OIA. I will make a separate OIA request to establish your capability in this area - because this will be a matter of public interest, and of course for Archives NZ.

Yours sincerely,

Chris Johnston

Dear Rebecca Ewert,

Please confirm that my response has been received and that the requested information will be provided.

You get to nominate a reasonable date, but given that the UoA should have already undertaken quantitative searches to objectively determine that this OIA would be too much work I anticipate that your answers would not require a long turnaround.

Yours sincerely,

Chris Johnston