HotWhopper: Irony alert: The Open Atmospheric Society, Openness and Transparency

"Earlier this month, the Open Atmospheric Society, after months of secrecy about itself, finally called for nominations to its board. Investigations by a HotWhopper reader, FLWolverine, revealed who is formally behind the organisation. As most of us guessed,  it's the creation of Anthony Watts who runs a conspiracy theory and climate science denial blog WUWT. His co-founder is Joe D'Aleo. They registered the OAS in Nevada back in July 2012. Seems that the OAS enjoys irony. Today Anthony announced (archived here) that the OAS has joined with organisations like the AAAS, AGU, AMS and others to become a signatory to the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines of the Centre for Open Science. As stated on the COS website, organization signatories are: Expressing their support of the principles of openness, transparency, and reproducibility If relevant, encouraging associated journals to conduct a review of the standards and levels for potential adoption ... It would be supremely ironic for an organisation to sign up to principles of openness and transparency without any transparency in the decision to do so. Without any formal decision being made by the organisation. Given there is no decision-making process in place yet, since there's no governance in place yet, the process by which the decision was taken, to become a signatory, is far from transparent. Moreover, your irony meter will be about to explode over this, when you find out that so far, the OAS has been anything but open and transparent ... In the absence of any board, Anthony Watts has appointed himself as 'acting executive director'. It would appear that he is unilaterally taking decisions on behalf of the members of the society. This goes beyond simply taking membership applications and fulfilling necessary administrative functions. He's taking broad-brush policy decisions as well, with no transparency of decision-making and no indication that the members were consulted on decisions ..."