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.
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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
No. McCarthyism was about finding Soviet/communist loyalists (or even spies) that were working for the US government. Interestingly, found many.
Cuccinellism is about investigating the accounting of public funds which were used by a known fraudster.
Wobble:
Fortunately, I work for a university, just like Mann and none of my research is “classified” by the government.
But when a university accepts public funds for a project, then specific rules apply to that project.
Wren says:
May 2, 2010 at 7:39 pm
“This is a repugnant piece of over-zealousness by the Virginia Attorney General, that I condemn,” says McIntyre over at ClimateAudit.
Followed by the ‘baying for Mann’s blood’ by the resident claque! As I’ve posted before the AG seems to be exceeding his authority in citing Federal grants, if he doesn’t do so of course he’s left with a single grant for which John Albertson (now at Duke) was the PI not Mann. Some of the comments over there remind me of the following from ‘A Man for all Seasons’, they should beware what they wish for:
“William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake! “
wobble says:
May 2, 2010 at 10:37 pm
“McCarthyism was about finding Soviet/communist loyalists (or even spies) that were working for the US government.”
Totally OT regarding this case, probably, but a bit regarding McCarthyism;
Did you know that it was the lend-lease agreement between the US and the USSR that was the reason why the politicians in the US became so angry and upset about the USSR spies?
As you know, the Lend-Lease was about sending equipment from the US to the USSR in order to help them in the war against Germany. The strange thing is, it didnt end in 1945. And believe me, the amount of equipment was no small matter.
But the thing that upset everyone was that intelligence papers was sendt with the very Lend-Lease US-transports to the USSR!
And it was truck-loads upon truck-loads of top secret papers.
At first noone cared, but finally this information reached up to the very top of society, and created an outrage.
One of the best books I’ve ever read describes this;
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Sun-Making-Hydrogen-Bomb/dp/0684824140
Can anyone here say, “Cherry picked Yarmal tree data”? 33 trees show no warming and one single tree shows anomolous warming. So what did mann do? Throw out all the normal trees and keep the single tree. Without normalizing the data with the other trees it made the ‘hockey stick” and that just isn’t truthful. So go get the fraud and haul his faked data and cherry-picked tree out where everyone can see it.
“wobble says:
May 2, 2010 at 9:51 pm
Doug Badgero says:
May 1, 2010 at 8:25 pm
What do activist AGs have to do with the Bernie Madoff case? His ponzi scheme fell apart as redemptions mounted during the financial crisis. Nothing to do with activist AGs.
An activist AG, or a non-activitst AG, could have investigated Bernie Madoff and uncovered his fraud before it fell apart. Your point that redemptions caused his scheme to fall apart is meaningless.”
Please provide an example of an activist AG who has caught a Bernie Madoff. Are you suggesting that they should be allowed to go on fishing expeditions into anyone they are politically opposed to? What a joke.
To date activist AGs have done little except raise the cost of cigarettes and further their political careers at the expense our democratic republic.
Lots and lots of speculation here but the truth is that all we seem to have is the AG’s demand letter to the Rector at UV. We really don’t know his motives or his evidence. If Dr. Mann misused the funds or violated the terms of the grant, that’s one thing. If the AG thinks he can disprove AGW via a grand jury, that’s an entirely different kettle of eels. Don’t expect transparency. These guys only reveal what they are compelled to reveal. I may actually find myself on Dr. Mann’s side for once.
Issues by reason of retrospection
1. Bernie Madoff positioned himself within a regulatory body. So do Mann and Pachauri.
2 Argue from authority. So do Mann, Pachauri, Hansen and Jones
3 Madoff ran Nasdaq. Mann and 3-4 friends run the peer review side of a couple of publications
4 No 3rd party audits. Ask McIntyre about data secrecy. How dare Mr Watts question sites for gathering data.
5 Anger in private e-mails. This sometimes covers fear. Fear of getting caught.
6 Confessions in private. The heat is hidden. Can’t explain the lack of warming.
You all can always have fun analysing Algore, James hansen and M Mann using the freudian and Valliant ego defense mechanisms for benchmarks. Joe Romm displays the widest mix of anxiety disorders and the others I named do the wrap up of defense mechanisms.
1 example is the Label “denial” In the course of warmists using the label “deniers” they are actually doing 2 things. They deny there is a controversy and they employ another defense mechanism we call “projection”.
Are you serious? Do you really want examples of AG’s catching Ponzi schemes?
test Let me know how many more you want.
No, I’m suggesting that AG are allowed to investigate possible fraudulent use of public funds if probable cause exists. Evidence of Mann’s fraudulent activities (regardless of the timing) have provided probable cause to any prosecutor that desires to investigate.
So where’s the Amen Chorus to sing praises for Mann and of the evils of his prosecutors
– featuring Jim Hansen in a shrill falsetto, Al Gore in an unconvincing tenor, Judith Curry in a tone deaf alto
sorry Judith …
What witch hunt? What peer review?
It isn’t science or scholarship when you refuse to provide your data and methods for review. If this is legitimate research, then what is there to fear. This isn’t a radical concept. What is unscientific, is the attitude of the defenders and apologists for propagandists such as Mann, Hansen, Jones and the rest of the climate alarmists. If they aren’t willing to practice the scientific method; then they aren’t scientists. They are engaged in fantasy for political and economic purposes. It is their task to prove their hypothesis, not the other way around. Let the data and method speak for itself!
What should prove more interesting are the various communications requested. I suspect that if they are released, they won’t be limited to e-mails between scientific colleagues. I suspect there will be communications, instructions, and possibly payments between a variety of players across the political, business, and environmental spectrum on a national and international level.
I hope the Attorney General doesn’t settle for what they give him, but that he gets some forensic computer experts to find out what Mann as well as others at the university have tried to erase. Start keeping tabs on who is starting to squeal their indignation the loudest. Their tracks may show up in the released material. I’m hoping the material will be shared with James Inhofe as soon as possible and after November he will be able to do the same to Hansen at NASA.
Below is an excerpt from the Gold Standard for scientific peer review:
From SCIENCE: If should be submitting to us, authors implicitly agree to a number of editorial and publishing policies that are central to our mission. While many of these policies are associated mainly with original research published in Science, philosophically they underlie our approach across all of our publications. Any reasonable request for materials, methods, or data necessary to verify the conclusions of the experiments reported must be honored…
Before publication, large data sets, including protein or DNA sequences, microarray data, and crystallographic coordinates, must be deposited in an approved database and an accession number provided for inclusion in the published paper, under our database deposition policy.
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jeff brown says:
April 29, 2010 at 9:11 pm
Jim says:
April 29, 2010 at 4:52 pm
Jim, does that mean you don’t want the government to fund medical research as well? what about research into the safety of the water and food you drink? should that go away too?
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If the government must fund research, some isolation mechanism should be set up. For example, a science fund is set up that collects contributions from the government and other entities, like corporations, non-profits … whatever. Then a multi-disciplinary committee decides what research gets funded. I’m sure a politically astute person could come up with a better scheme that would do more to ensure impartiality, but you get the idea. The only exemptions might be big physics and space projects. So, the point is there should be a way to isolate science and politics. I don’t see why medicine should be exempted. There are plenty of companies that can fund that. And the government can definitely get out of the food and water research business as far as I’m concerned. That’s mostly overblown hype anyway.
BillD said:
“I don’t know if Mann’s original grant proposals are available to the public. Presumably, he proposed to use proxies, such as tree rings to estimate average temperatures over the last 2-3,ooo years. Since his salary was probably paid by the university, most of the budget probably went to pay for graduate students, postdocs and technical help. He published a number of papers based on the grant proposal work, presumably based on the methods and work found in the grant proposal. Unless some of the money was misappropropriated, it seems likely that he used the money for its intended purpose. I doubt that the AG is well qualified to weigh in on the assumptions and quality of the analysis.”
BillD, I don’t know what your understanding of graduate student and post-doc salaries is. I was a post-doc at UVa during this period (and a relatively well compensated one because I was an NSF fellow) and I made $35,000 per year. The graduate students made half that. I didn’t see a lot of names on those papers.
Now, that having been said, the overhead on science funds to support the liberal arts departments is actually quite large. So while it is true that the univeristy “pays” Mann’s salary, the pool out of which that salary is paid is funded by the overhead on grants brought in by Mann and his colleagues. That pool also pays for all of the liberal arts tenured falculty that are bringing in little or no grant funds. That would be the English, History, etc. folks. Additionally, Mann’s salary would have been a 9 month salary. It is considered perfectly acceptable for someone like Mann to pay his “summer salary” out of his grants. I will now use a totally made up number for Mann’s salary and leave it to the reader to decide if they want to determine Mann’s actually salary during the time period. But if Mann’s 9 month salary were $100,000 then it would be perfectly acceptable for him to pay himself $33,000 out of the grant three months out of eahc year. In this scenario, a 3-year, $500,000 grant could easily have 1/5th of it’s funds dispersed directly into Mann’s salary. Another $150,000 could easily go toward department overhead (out of which Mann and other salaries are drawn) leaving about $250,000 for “actual” research. This money could pay post-doc and graduate researcher salaries but also would go toward expenses for meetings (travel, hotel, etc.). I don’t know what Mann’s meeting schedule was like.
For me, the fact that so much of the money goes directly to Mann’s and colleagues salaries and travel expenses turns your argument against you. And makes me all the more convinced that this money had BETTER NOT have any kind of political agenda attached to it. Unfortunately, the evidence seems to be clearer every day that much of this work had a clear agenda with outcomes determined before the research was done and data maipulated to support that outcome. Unfortunately, with Mann “lawyering up” it’s unlikely that the waters will become anything other than muddier. And, oh, by the way, Mann is likely NOT paying for the majority of his legal expenses out of pocket. I’d like some clarity on that as well.
McIntyre has just posted a link to a video’d interview with Cuccinelli, here:
http://thekojonnamdishow.org/shows/2010-05-07/politics-hour
In it Cuccinelli states that
So he’s got something to go on. He’d have been very foolish to have gone in flying blind. I hope it’s something clear-cut and purely procedural, otherwise Mann will look picked-upon.