Late yesterday the State Attorney General of Virginia posted this legal brief which had been filed with the courts, and also served to the University of Virginia (UVA).
This legal brief document is about discovery, not about a lawsuit. It is a prelude, and it is possible that no lawsuit may be filed if there is insufficient evidence to back up speculations that have been raised over the Climategate affair.
The current issue is over UVA refusing releasing emails from Dr. Michael Mann related to his work on the MBH98 and MBH99 papers, which later generated the famous “hockey stick” graph used by the IPCC:
Via the Charlottesville Daily Progress (thankfully unrelated to Climate Progress) Attorney General Ken Cuccinnelli wrote this in the brief:
“ … It is clear that there is ample reason to believe that Mann may have committed a violation of FATA while he was at the university,” the filing says. “There is no debate that the university is in possession of documents relevant to determining if such a violation did occur. Accordingly, and for the reasons that follow, the court should deny the university’s petition.”
UVA has been stonewalling, and the State Attorney General has made it clear that their line of defense has limited traction and a very limited shelf life, setting deadlines. Here are a couple of excerpts from the document. FATA is the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act. A link to the legal document follows.
From page 1:
From page 2:
The entire legal document is available here from the State of Virginia Attorney General website:
http://www.vaag.com/PRESS_RELEASES/Cuccinell/Brief%20in%20Opp%207-13-10.pdf
h/t to Chris Horner, Competitive Enterprise Institute
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Loose the hounds!
Kerry-Lieberman latest 667 page utility only ‘cap-and-tax’ bill http://thehill.com/images/stories/blogs/ghgdraft.pdf #capandtrade #capandtax
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Reid throws climate lifeline to greens http://bit.ly/bTUJdw
I hope there is sufficient evidence to bring legal proceedings. Mann has coducted bad science that caused enormous global implications and as such needs to be forced to account for his actions in a court of law.
Go Virginia!!
Mann deserves some real peer review – before 12 of his peers!
Jones asked Mann and others to delete certain e mails. Mann is reported as saying that he refused to delete them. Coerce him to produce them now as some evidence of his scientific integrity.
I think the “fraud against taxpayers” comes more in the use that others have made of Mann’s work, than just the Mann himself. Mann left the door ajar… to Gore and his ilk… and where is that material from Lonnie Thompson that has never been made publicly available?
Wow, I didn’t think this was going anywhere. In Britain the Establishment would have closed ranks quicker than you can say “All power corrupts” and the action would have been buried.
If the Virginia AG is successful in obtaining the required information from UVA then let us hope it puts the wind up other rent seeking scientists who take billions of taxpayers dollars in order to deliver the junk science that allows politicians to shaft said taxpayers ten ways from Sunday.
Ater reading essentially all of the Climategate emails, one can be excuse for forming an impression that research grant monies were sometimes diverted to other uses. Whether the other uses were approved or not, by the donor, in detail or in generality, remains to be investigated. There is an impression that a few people called the tunes and paid the pipers with funds of doubtful authorisation. That is one reason why this State of Virginia Attorney General should be allowed to proceed. Another moral, rather than legal reason, is that the peasants thrown the funding crumbs were sometimes guided as to what they should write.
This is to replace my just-vanished comment.
Having just skim-read the court docs filed by the Virginia AG, I am very impressed by a) the volume and depth of the research that the Virginia AG’s team has compiled in this matter and b) the protections under the law in the State of Virginia for the taxpayer. I realise many Americans see Ken Cuccinelli as a blatant self-publicist who uses the law for personal advancement, but I doubt that his actions in this matter are mere political aggrandisement. Would that other parts of the so-called ‘free world’ had elected officials who would act in the public good as energeticall as Ken Cuccinelli.
This is quite cheering after witnessing the venal manipulations by the Establishment of the so-called official enquiries in the UK and their obviously pre-ordained outcomes
Alexander, comments appear to vanish on me from time to time. Quickest way to check is to hit the “go back to previous page” button. You will find your comment still in the reply box. Hit post comment. If the comment has already been received it will tell you.
Simples, as Alexandr Thingumabob the meerkat says.
Good comment by the way. You capture the UK Establishment way of doing things succinctly and perfectly.
I hope that he will find clear evidence of straightforward financial naughtiness and secure a conviction on that, rather than getting bogged down into arguments about the validity or otherwise of statistical methods applied to temperature proxies.
For many people, this would settle the question “can climate scientists be trusted?”.
In the case of Cucinelli V Mann
The s%!t’s about to hit the fan
The court will decide
If the decline, run and hide
Is legit or should go in the can.
Can someone explain why the AG needs to go to court to get Mann’s emails, UVa passed over all of Dr. Michaels to Greenpeace on the back of a FOI request.
Game on!… Steve McIntyre is too much of a sporting gentleman to approve of trial lawyer tactics, but if the table was turned, does anyone doubt the Obama AG (never let a good crisis go to waste) wouldn’t have us ALL up against crimes against humanity charges before the Hague…
First they came for Anthony and we were silent, then they came for…
http://mises.org/books/TRTS/
Virginia law is somewhat unique in that it was well in place decades prior to the forming of the United States and has one of the longest legal histories on the continent. What is interesting is if the OAG where to have convened a Grand Jury there would be no question regarding subpoenas. Grand Juries and their powers predate the forming of the US as well and have extraordinarily broad powers of investigation. Agree with those that say the OAG position should be a slam dunk.
What ever happened to police coming in to confiscate all records and data before they get deleted and tampered with?
Do you honestly think ALL the documents requested will be forthcoming?
I have seen this type of behavour by an government agency where they closed down for the day to “get their paperwork in order”.
At least this was not under a government area where they can site the “national secrets act”.
Less than two weeks ago, there were cries of “blacklist” about the PNAS report concerning consensus on climate science. While I thought that the response to the PNAS report was way overblown, I certainly do not think that people skeptical of anthropogenic global warming should be persecuted, prosecuted or sued. Who of those cheering for the attorney general of Virginia (or for Chris Monckton’s apparent threat of a libel suit against John Abraham) think that skeptics should be persecuted, prosecuted or sued? If it can happen to AGW proponents, it can happen to AGW opponents.
Although there is much about Prof. Mann’s research with which I disagree, I believe that is absolutely the wrong approach to use. The net result is an attack on academic and intellectual freedom. The club used against your opponent can just as easily be turned against you.
@Jeff T. Sorry, I don’t buy it. This is a very specific allegation of fraud and Mr Mann should be expected to answer it in a court of law. He may, of course, be proven innocent. Being sued or prosecuted is only an issue if you are found guilty surely? Persecution is another matter. Only one charge has been laid at Mr Mann’s door – it is hardly persecution.
Hi JeffT
Yes – it can go both ways and that is quite correct. No one sector should be immune from the law.
And that surely is the case here. Sceptics are not the ones making lurid assumptions from models fed with data designed to get the desired result.
Sceptics are simply asking pertinent questions of said results and data arrays because rather than normal scientific scepticism we see full blown advocacy. That is not science.
So if government grant monies were issued to produce “Science” but instead the tax payer got advocacy skewed to look like science, then in my book a fraud has taken place.
It is akin to benefit fraud where people lie about their reality to obtain social security benefits.
Is it so different (apart from the size of the funds!) when a so called scientist fiddles the data to create a scare story to get yet more grant money?
Thank goodness this unsavoury possibility is going to be looked at. I shall watch with interest.
Wow! “Academics are free to follow any philosophy they wish but Post Normal Science has produced jargon which can be misleading/fraudulent in a grant application …”
So IOW: do what ever you like but at the very least make sure I understand what that is when I pay you. Finally someone has started to ask hard questions about whether or not the Team was free to follow its course while eating out of the public trough.
John Eagan says 6:08
I tempted to cry out bull John. I think about any “club” is useful against these so called warmers. They are taking taxpayer money for their scams. The anti- agw side gets no money for trying to prove them wrong. The real question still is what is causing the earth to warm at the present time. I for one don’t know and I feel confident that the science is not settled. I just get tired of all the alarming things put out by the “team” and all their supporters. They are mainly out to keep taking in our money IMO. I want to carry a big club until the science is settled.
Who of those cheering for the attorney general of Virginia (or for Chris Monckton’s apparent threat of a libel suit against John Abraham) think that skeptics should be persecuted, prosecuted or sued? If it can happen to AGW proponents, it can happen to AGW opponents.
Jeff T.,
You are comparing apples and oranges. We “skeptics” (I prefer the term “climate realist”) are merely voicing our informed opinions and are not receiving lucrative government grants, which have been doled out in the hundreds of millions of dollars to scientists toeing the AGW line.
Michael Mann, on the other hand, appears to have knowingly manipulated data in an effort to create a hockey stick graph that fraudulently removed the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age, creating the appearance of runaway global warming during the past 30 years or so. And he did it all at taxpayers’ expense.
Worse still, Mann’s widely disseminated — and now debunked — graph was one of the lynchpins of the AGW hypothesis, appearing in IPPC Assessment Reports and routinely cited as evidence of runaway global warming by those scientists and politicians calling for draconian CO2 reductions and economy-killing cap-and-trade energy controls. The impact of his dodgy research has been far reaching.
Mann must be held to account.