Cites nearly half a million dollars in state grant-funded climate research conducted while [Dr. Michael ] Mann— now director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State— was at UVA between 1999 and 2005.
From The Hook, it seems satirical YouTube videos will be the least of Dr. Mann’s worries now.
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No one can accuse Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli of shying from controversy. In his first four months in office, Cuccinelli directed public universities to remove sexual orientation from their anti-discrimination policies, attacked the Environmental Protection Agency, and filed a lawsuit challenging federal health care reform. Now, it appears, he may be preparing a legal assault on an embattled proponent of global warming theory who used to teach at the University of Virginia, Michael Mann.
In papers sent to UVA April 23, Cuccinelli’s office commands the university to produce a sweeping swath of documents relating to Mann’s receipt of nearly half a million dollars in state grant-funded climate research conducted while Mann— now director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State— was at UVA between 1999 and 2005.
If Cuccinelli succeeds in finding a smoking gun like the purloined emails that led to the international scandal dubbed Climategate, Cuccinelli could seek the return of all the research money, legal fees, and trebled damages.
“Since it’s public money, there’s enough controversy to look in to the possible manipulation of data,” says Dr. Charles Battig, president of the nonprofit Piedmont Chapter Virginia Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment, a group that doubts the underpinnings of climate change theory.
…
The Attorney General has the right to make such demands for documents under the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, a 2002 law designed to keep government workers honest.
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more at The Hook
h/t to Chip Knappenberger
Looking at Ken Cuccinelli’s record I’m hardly impressed.
I wouldn’t trust any finding that comes out of this, it will be completely partisan.
Mann has revealed his true motivations—”environmental justice.” Time to expose this Mann for the socialist fraud he is. Don’t let up. No prisoners. Then move on to the next progressive.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10120/1054507-100.stm
Anu, April 30, 2010 at 11:39 am
Upthread, Anu quote, verbatim:
“Weren’t you the one predicting that Dr. Phil Jones would be executed fired?”
As I said: “Did I predict that Jones would be fired? Or executed?? Kindly show me exactly where I said either one.”
Since you have now verified that I never used either word, are you ready to retract? As I stated, Jones was out of a job. Or do you disagree? I seem to recall that he was forced to “step down” as Director of CRU, after which he blubbered about suicidal thoughts, his hair turned snow white, and he looked like he aged about 15 years in a couple of months. That looks like being forced out of a job to most folks, hard as that is for you to admit. The fact that he was given a pat on the head and his nameplate back probably has something to do with knowing where the bodies are buried.
And since you’re in your mom’s basement keeping a database on everyone’s opinions, why did you leave out my statements that the whole CRU business would end up being a whitewash? Inconvenience? Cherrypicking? Trolling?
pcknappenberger says:
April 30, 2010 at 4:05 pm
Now the nightmare is fully revealed…
Yes, it certainly does look like a fishing expedition, as I pointed out above there was only one grant from Virginia ($214,000) and Mann was only a co-PI. The AG is claiming the right to investigate all grants received by UVa with which Mann was associated, mostly from NOAA. Appears to be casting a broad net and probably exceeding his authority. Hard to believe there is sufficient justification to claim the right to see all of Mann’s emails and documents from 1999 to the present!
I love this bit:
10. The scope of this CID is to reach any and all data, documents and things in your possession, including those stored or residing on any computer, hard drive, desktop, laptop, file server, database server, email servers or other systems where data was transmitted or stored on purpose or as a result of transient use of a system or application in the course of day to day research or product processing work that is owned or contracted for by you or any of your officers, managers, employees, agents, board members, academic departments, divisions, programs, IT department, contractors and other representatives.
Is there a definition of “things”. It is used extensively in the CID. Does Mann have to explain why he flused faeces down the toilet as this must shurely be a “thing”. And he has therefore wilfully destroyed the evidence.
Is this CID a joke. Shurely it not enforceable. 30 days to produce what has been requested must be a staggering task.
All this for $500k over 6 years spread amongst how many people and how much equipent etc.
Must be a joke?
If not it will help China/India rise to dominate the sciences for it will destroy US science.
/harry
We need some perspective on this. What’s the guy done wrong? He’s not a murderer or rapist. At worst what’s he done :-
1) Bad science – well I’m afraid you’re going to have to go after alot more scientists, I can think of a few virologist for a start.
2) Used his science to promote his own political ideas. I’m not sure the US system is totally politics-free. My outsider understanding is your supreme court judges are employed with tax dollars to bring their own convervative or liberal ideas to the rule of law. Just because you don’t like somebodys politics is not a reason to bring the full weight of the state down on somebody.
There is a notion of freedom of speech and thought that should even extend to those paid with tax dollars. You should be careful what you wish for.
L says:
April 30, 2010 at 2:10 pm
Sharkey, the word you’re looking for is “cojones.” Kahunas are Hawaiian “big men.”
================================
Thank you, L.
LOL my part. I partially attribute that to being on Percocet because I’m recovering from a severe arm fracture being stupid on in-line skates. Correction noted.
Chris
Norfolk Virginia USA
If Mann had not flagged himself so badly with discredited junk science, such as the hockey stick, and the fact that that “junk” has helped drive the IPCC and potential multi-trillion dollar cost to the taxpayer and international criminal redistribution of wealth, then perhaps Mann could be quietly going about his work, doing what so many other good scientists in the world currently do without incident: good science.
Chris
Norfolk Virginia USA
“HR says:
This is ugly!
You may not like him or the work he has done but using the minutiae of the law to bring the man down is going a bit far. I thought you freedom loving Americans wanted the State off peoples backs.”
HR, with all due respect, Americans do want the State off their backs, AND out of their pocketbooks. Mann, et al. were taking money from the State’s taxpayers, and there seems to be a prima facie case that they were using that money to engage in scientific fraud. If scientists want taxpayer money then they have to be prepared to answer to those same taxpayers for how that money is used.
As far as I am concerned ALL of the work product from those scientists belongs to the State and the State’s taxpayers who paid for it. And the taxpayers want to know if they got value for their money. If Mann and the rest of the “scientific community” have a problem with that then they should stop taking taxpayers’ money.
As to culpability, Mann’s “Hockey Stick” graph was featured in early IPCC reports and in Gore’s propaganda movie. The “Hockey Stick” showed no Medieval Warm Period (MWP) or Little Ice Age (LIA), which Mann’s selective data and methods smoothed out. It showed “unprecedented” warming coincident with the industrial use of fossil fuels. To my knowledge, Mann never retracted his findings.
The essential IPCC argument is:
Current warming is unprecedented (no MWP or LIA).
The warming is correlated over time with carbon dioxide produced by industrial combustion.
Therefore, human activity is responsible for the rise in temperature,
And should pay financiers, governments and the UN trillions of dollars.
However, the MWP and LIA did happen, and not due to industrial combustion. Current warming has precedent in Natural Variability.
CO2 levels rose after the temperature increase.
Human use of fossil fuels contributes little to the increase of a trace gas such as CO2.
A doubling of atmospheric CO2 would have about the same effect on average temperature as moving from Boston to New York City.
Predicted catastrophic scenarios depend on IPCC feedback and coupling estimates in climate models. These scenarios are not happening. The decadal disasters and tipping points continue to be late for their appointments.
Therefore, we do not owe the would-be rulers our Liberty, our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.
It is about time!
I wish the AG good luck in figuring this out.
If the climategate emails are real and his wonderful hockey stick generator program is also real – there seems to be a whole lotta fraud going on.
Let’s see if his climategate co-conspirators get roped in as well.
This may make the UK whitewash look a bit foolish.
For those that do not think this is the AG’s job, you obviously do not understand that we are a nation of laws and the AG is just doing his job – much better than a lynch mob.
Yeah, I realized that after I hit Submit.
Or maybe it’s both.
Well, so far he hasn’t held a press conference about the matter, or issued any public / political statements of a partisan nature. I.e., he hasn’t tried to inflame public opinion, merely offered a justification for his action. He could have acted in a more “political” fashion.
The prior AG was a lame duck when Climategate hit. The latter event is the “recent information” (smoke) that would justify a look-see for fire in Mann’s activities. The latter is also what may have motivated a UVA informant to tattle recently on Mann, as someone speculated above.
———
I doubt that anything that is legally fraudulent or improper in a major way will be found, but it would be madness not to check it out just in case (the precautionary principle), even with a slightly scary, partisan AG, given the trillions at stake. Furthermore, non-fraudulent behavior that is relevant to Mann’s mindset is needful for the public to know, given what’s at stake. And it’s rightful for the public to know, given that they paid the freight.
For instance, did he send or receive e-mails in which this phrase (or its equivalent) was used: “We’ve got to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”? Or did he say that to my hypothesized “tattler”? If so, the public will know that what it’s dealing with in his article is “advocacy research,” not science.
I suspect (partly based on the quote from the former president of UVA that I posted earlier in the thread) that the AG has heard oral testimony to this effect (i.e., testimony that indicates bias and an ends-justifies-the-means attitude on Mann’s part) and that he is now looking for hard (documentary) evidence to back this up. If so, he’s doing his duty.
Anu says…:
A birth certificate still has not been provided. What was provided online was a certificate of live birth. They are not the same.
So please move on from trying to make Ken Cuccinelli look like an unbalanced human being.
I continue to feel the urge to quote this about you Anu:
“Cast not your pearls before swine lest they trample them under their feet then turn and tear you to pieces.”
Harry Lu says:
April 30, 2010 at 6:40 pm
I love this bit:
10. The scope of this CID is to reach any and all data, documents and things in your possession, including those stored or residing on any computer, hard drive, desktop, laptop, file server, database server, email servers or other systems where data was transmitted or stored on purpose or as a result of transient use of a system or application in the course of day to day research or product processing
Is there a definition of “things”. It is used extensively in the CID.>>
Poorly worded, but at end of day it means any data you had, no matter where you stored it, cough it up. USB stick, cought it up, backup tape we get to see what was on it. The impact will in large par be on the IT department. If they have the proper archive and e-discovery software in place, they enter the terms, run the report, and anything Mann touched comed up. Print and ship. I doubt they have it though, most universities aren’t that sophisticated, they may not have even standard backup procedures.
I reject the notion that this is a witch hunt though. Sur it was “only” 500K. If a cop sees a thug grab a puser, she arrests the thug. Dollars in purse $50. Cost to arrest, process, court appearancesm public attourney, 3 weeks in jail, one year community service (supervised) about 40,000. But fail to do that and watch the number of stoleb purses sky rocket.
I don’t like this prosecutory on a lot of issues but on this one he his bang on. A whole lot of universities are trying to find our right now if they have proper backup and ediscovery tools in place and can responde to someting like this cost effectively. And a who lot of researchers who have been over the line are slowly stepping back.
This could be a painful think, but it is a nesessary thing. Mann will write a book at some point and retire to a large house in a nice part of time with an internal climate control system that allows him to predict anything he wants.
mikael pihlström says: April 30, 2010 at 12:03 pm
“M & M showed that Mann’s statistical method was not good. This
was confirmed in a publication by a third party , concluding
however that it did not change the essence of the matter (the
stick). If I remember correctly all this was reported in the last IPCC
report.”
Well, yes, that’s how the IPCC tells the story. But the facts are somewhat different than what the IPCC would have you believe.
The conclusion that any criticism of AGW does not change (to use your word) the essence seems to be standard (dismissive) operating procedure. But on this particular matter, the IPCC’s reporting on the “controversy” has been unconscionably dishonest and decidedly unbalanced.
http://hro001.wordpress.com/2010/01/18/the-climate-change-game-monopoly-the-ipcc-version/
George E. Smith says:
April 29, 2010 at 4:17 pm
How will we obtain the evidence if the data is hidden?
It seems almost obligatory to people in the climate change research to hide their data. Look at all the trouble some have had in getting simple temperature readings from the likes of CRU.
All scientists, whether publicly funded or not, should make their methods and data public.
During WWII, one of the biggest problems people like Bohr and Szilard (true giants in science) had with their work was the necessity of secrecy while the bomb was being built. They felt such secrecy was anathema to science. Neils Bohr suggested once the war was over to share all the ‘secrets’ with the Soviet ‘ally’. Churchill and FDR would have nothing to do with it. Churchill actually thought the physical rules of the universe could be hidden.
Bohr said the alternative to sharing the data would be an arms race.
Now who turned out to be right?
My, how things have changed in the field of science.
We now have scientists acting like politicians and politicians pretending to be scientists.
Even actors are acting like scientists. Danny Glover said the Haitian earthquake was a direct result of the Copenhagen treaty talks collapsing.
(Psssst…, Danny, don’t give up the day job.)
“….in to the possible manipulation of data,”
Again, I’m going to say, if it is true that any data put through Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick computer program outputs a hockey stick shape then that is manipulation of data.
Send in the hounds!
Doug Badgero says:
April 29, 2010 at 6:07 pm
So, if you were in charge, Bernie Madoff would get a pass?
Jeff L says:
April 29, 2010 at 6:33 pm
Number one: Anthony’s efforts are not publicly funded.
Number two: All of Anthony’s data is published.
Ron Pittenger, Heretic says:
April 29, 2010 at 7:39 pm
Ron,
Here I thought I was cynic about human affairs and had seen it all.
I had no idea that anyone could even conceive of such an outrage. Yet, there it is.
And people wonder why I don’t trust government or private business interests.
I’m still shaking my head in disbelief.
I do appreciate the information. Another reason for loving WUWT.
The “warmists” are just like the Goldman Sachs guys – they can’t prosper without gaming the system.
In a fair fight, they’re curled up in the fetal position – it’s only if you bind 3/4ths of your limbs, blindfold and mentally impair yourself, that they’ll call it even…and then the pile-on ensues.
Global Warming = Peak Oil = The Easter Bunny.
WestHoustonGeo says:
April 29, 2010 at 8:48 pm
I was at a fight once and a hockey game broke out…
Henry chance says:
April 30, 2010 at 5:55 am
I would be outraged at this. Everyone knows unicorns are blue.