This rebuttal comment to I’ll Trade You Cuccinelli For Splattergate With A Player To Be Named Later was so well written, and so extensive, I felt that it deserves the honor of a guest post status.
– Anthony
Guest Post by Thomas Fuller
But it didn’t rise to a criminal level (that was the UK deleting emails in advance of Freedom of Information requests, not Michael Mann). What Ken Cuccinelli is doing is going fishing for wrongdoing without an allegation of such wrongdoing–and that’s not how we should be doing things in this country.
I’ll get a lot of flack from you on this–and don’t be shy, I can take it. But remember as you write–District Attorneys are not always Republican, and controversial scientists can be skeptics at times, too. Don’t let your desire for a short term victory in the daily news cycle let you ignore what would be an erosion of all our civil liberties, I beg of you.
Let’s begin by examining the validity of your statement, “But it didn’t rise to a criminal level (that was the UK deleting emails in advance of Freedom of Information requests, not Michael Mann). What Ken Cuccinelli is doing is going fishing for wrongdoing without an allegation of such wrongdoing–and that’s not how we should be doing things in this country.” On the contrary, there are outstanding allegations of wrongdoing.
Michael Mann and the University of Virginia refused to comply with the law and a citizen’s lawful FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request for e-mail held by the University, claiming the e-mail no longer existed. When Virginia Attorney General Cuccinelli served a subpoena on the University to deliver the e-mail, the supposedly deleted and non-existent e-mail was recovered from the University computer servers. Consequently, it appears there is every reason to suspect a crime was committed when the citizen’s FOIA request was denied on the basis of a fraudulent claim of destruction of the e-mail. Unlike the case with the University of East Anglia, the statute of Limiitations is likely to remain in force in the Virginia case. It remains to be determined whether or not the evidentiary discovery will support misdemeanor and/or felony charges. That is the purpose and due process of law for which the CID is needed and proper.
Then there is the issue of the $466,000 (nearly a half million dollars) in grant monies Michael Mann solicited and received from the State of Virginia and its taxpayers, in addition to the huge sums of money he and the University of Virginia received from the U.S. Government. It has been argued by a group of scientists and others that Michael Mann and the University of Virginia should somehow be uniquely immune from a Civil Investigative Demand (CID) in a prima facie FOIA and/or fraud criminal case on the basis of some unwritten gentleman’s agreement to avoid interference with the intellectual freedom of scientists. Thusly, these same people see no cognitive dissonance, hypocrisy, or injustice when they punished, sanctioned, threatened, intimidated, and/or defrauded non-scientists and dissenting scientists by dismissing state climatologists, dissenting climate scientists, dissenting meteorologists, academics, students, political appointees, and others without any Civil Investigative Demand, administrative board hearing, arraignment and trial, or other due process of law thay are now claiming for Michael Mann and the University of Virginia without any statutory or constitutional right.
Rubbing salt into the wounds of the public they have wronged for many years, they are trying to carve out a privileged position of immunity for themselves just as the Members of Congress have done so before them. Discriminating against other classes of citizens, these so-called scientists want to enjoy an immunity from investigation and prosecution not enjoyed by other citizens in our society. Expressing outrage that anyone would seek to interfere with the privacy of their communications and right to publish their communications while remaining immune from due process of law, members of their class of citizens have been running rampant in innumerable criminal cases of defrauding governments, businesses, private citizens, and causing the deaths of private citizens.
For one example, Dr. Scott Reuben pled guilty to numerous charges of fraud in which he faked numerous medical studies published in medical journals as peer reviewed research for such companies as Pfizer. Despite the peer reviews, Dr. Reuben didn’t even have any patients enrolled in his faked patient studies. Physicians relied upon these faked perr reviewed papers to provide medical care to their patients. It was subsequently determined that Dr. Scott Reuben had been faking a number of medical studies for some thirteen years without being discovered and prosecuted.
Somewhere there is someone reading the forgoing and saying Dr. Reuben is just an isolated case, and his fraud is not representative of any widespread scientific fraud. Unfortunately, they are just plain wrong and ignorant of the facts.
Take for another example, the problem with widespread fraud due to ghostwritten peer reviewed science papers. Acta Crystallographica Section E was compelled to retract more than 70 peer reviewed papers ghostwritten by Chinese scientists as faked or fraudulent studies. Pharmaceutical companies have a reputation for ghostwriting peer reviewed studies in-house and then paying medical doctors and scientists to permit their name to b used for publication of the studies. This fraudulent practice has been reported to be widespread in the pharmaceutical industry and some academia for many years as an outgrowth of the academic practice of using graduate students to perform service for their superiors holding doctorates. The University of Alabama at Birmingham has been yet another academic institution which had to retract a number of fraudulent peer reviewed papers and remove eleven proteins registered in a database of such proteins used in science.
The fallout from the notoriously fraudulent stem cell research of Hwang Woo-suk and the investigation of his associate, Professor Gerald P. Schatten of University of Pittsburgh have been ongoing.
Closer to NASA there is the case of Samim Anghaie, his wife, and their business, NETECH, which fraudulently obtained 2.5 million dollars in contracts from NASA among the 13 U.S. government contracts totalling 3.4 million dollars.
Within climate science there has been a number of incidents of suspected fraud, one of which was reported by Dr. S. Fred Singer described the allegations of either fabrication of Chinese weather station data or plagiarism by Wei-Chyung Wang, University of Albany, from work by his colleague in China, Zhaomei Zeng.
Suffice it to observe, scientific fraud is not at all uncommon, and some commentators describe scientific fraud as being rampant. Looking at the known incidents of scientific fraud, it can be seen the perpetration of such fraud is highly rewarding with grants and contracts amounting in various examples as $70,000, $466,000, and $3,400,000. Whistleblowers are typically punished for their honesty, resulting in great reluctance to disclose such scientific fraud or enthusiastic cooperation with such fraud.
In your statement, “But remember as you write–District Attorneys are not always Republican, and controversial scientists can be skeptics at times, too,” you indulge in a fallacy seemingly common to many so-called Liberal-Left Democrats. You see opponents as necessarily being some kind of badly fundamental religious Right-wing extremist or at least some misguided minority Right-wing-nut Republican. Well, such ideas are extremist fantasies. There ae a great many people who describe themselves, as Republicans, yes, but also Democrats, Libertarians, independents, and others who insist upon honesty, integrity, and impartiality. A great many of these people cheerfully wish a pox on all politicians, activists, and Lamestream journalists who seek to frustrate the ability of ordinary citizens to govern their own lives free of interference by by people who think they know better what is best for other people besides themselves and seek to make themselves immune from the same rules and burdens they would impose on others. Whether it is the special immunities and privileges the MainStream Media (MSM) seek to deny ordinary citizen journalists or the climate data and information climate scientists attempt to deny ordinary citizen observers of climate science, you don’t have to be a Republican, a political conservative, or a right-wing-nut, to join with our political opponents in demanding non-discriminatory application of the due process of law to scientists the same as other citizens and professions.
At the very least, the University of Virginia and/or Michael Mann appear to be liable to investigation and prosecution for the violation of laws relating to the FOIA release of the e-mail evidencing Michael Mann’s involvement in the handling of $466,000 of state grant funds. There is more than ample evidence that scientific fraud is a common enough crime to warrant investigations, and convincing evidence of at least some violations of law with respect to FOIA disclosures. Scientists are not yet privileged with the immunity needed to commit FOIA violations and scientific fraud with complete immunity from investigation and prosecution. let the Attorney General represent the citizens of Virginia and safeguard their taxpayer monies and their right to the freedom of information guaranteed by written laws.
@Tom Fuller
You speak of chilling effects of overzealous prosecution.
I’m reminded, and will now remind you, that Michael Mann threatened legal action against the Minnesotans for Global Warming in their famous viral video “Hide the Decline” if they did not remove it from YouTube. The poor youngsters from Minnesota having no finanical resources to fight back against Mann knuckled under and removed it.
All I have to say to Mann is: Live by the sword, die by the sword.
It couldn’t possibly be happening to a more deserving [snip].
As
Daniel H says:
October 7, 2010 at 6:25 am
re; archiving secrets
It’s no secret among anyone who has anything to do with setting up and maintaining computer networks that stored data undergoes daily, weekly, and monthly (progressively more rigorous) automated archiving so that should corruption or loss occur in primary storage the archival copies can be retrieved and the data restored with the loss limited in time to the last uncorrupted archive.
Now you know. Common wisdom in the trade is that you should never send any email that you wouldn’t want to see published on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper. The network never forgets. Deleting emails only removes the topmost of many copies. In fact there’s even a record of the deletions that can come back to haunt someone if they selectively remove certain correspondences while leaving others intact.
BillD says:
October 7, 2010 at 6:59 am
From Smokey’s listing of Mann’s grants, I wonder for how many is Mann the sole or even primary researcher? I assume that he played a small role in most of them. The biggest part of academic grants is often for supporting postdocs and graduate students. How many graduate students does Mann have? How many years did the grants cover and were all of these grants funded?
Indeed but you have to remember that Smokey is a liar (note to mods sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander). There’s a reason why Smokey removed the names of the PI from his list! He for example highlights the ‘fact’ that a ‘bribe’ was paid to a geologist (Mann) in the form of a grant to study malaria when in fact he knows full well that the award was made to an entomologist and that Mann was one of four co-PIs. For those unaware how the awarding of funding at universities work the PI is the one who controls the lion’s share of the funding and the co-PIs are like sub-contractors for special expertise. If as an entomologist you’re going to research in the effect of temperature on a disease vector it’s a good idea to have a climate specialist on the team submitting the proposal in order to pass the review stage.
Phil. says:
October 7, 2010 at 7:46 am
Does anyone have a complete list (with PI’s) of the grants received for Mann or the Team, the relevant details and how they performed (as in pubs & conferences, etc)? A spreadsheet would do. It would save a lot of time on future discussions.
BTW, I still suspect Mann isn’t getting a huge amount of public money for work he’s proposing to do, given the scope of the proposed work. It would be good to see numbers. Does he get private grants?
Phil. @ur momisugly 7:46 AM
Perhaps the names were deleted to protect the innocent. Perhaps the P. I.s should witness. What a great idea.
============
From the Washington Post,
By Jim Nolan | TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
Published: October 05, 2010:
“U.Va. said it has spent $352,874.76 in legal fees on the CID litigation, which has been financed through private funds.”
Hmmm, the first thought that came to my mind was – Wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper to let Cuccinelli see the documents? Unless…. Is there something they don’t want the AG to see? With that amount of money on the table I don’t buy any of the “protection of the sanctity of Academia philanthropic blah, blah, blah”. And, “financed through private funds”? This gets more interesting by the minute. The bottom line in legal expenses is that you always weigh how much it’s going to cost you one way or the other, and you take the cheapest way out. That is a serious chunk of cash to pay for the cheapest way out…….
Larry says:
October 7, 2010 at 7:10 am
Imagine a company paid the University a million dollars in research grants for a particular piece of science. When attempting to use it it seemed to be faulty. They asked the university to provide details of what they had done, and how they spent the money. The university refused.
But that’s not what happened is it, grants always have provisions for audits and approval of line items, UVa has not refused an audit by the grant awarding body as far as I’m aware. There is no indication that the study in question; “Resolving the Scale-wise Sensitivities in the Dynamical Coupling Between Climate and the Biosphere”, was faulty. What has happened is that someone outside the process has taken a dislike to the work of one of the co-PIs on a particular grant based on other work and has taken it upon himself to see if that person aided the PI in fraudulently obtaining a grant (he also tried to investigate awards outside the scope of the law he was using). To do this he asked for Mann’s communications over an extended period of time but didn’t apparently ask for anything from the PI of the grant! UVa challenged the legality of such an approach in court and won and he has now come back with a more tightly focussed search.
I personally cannot see any course of action for UoV except to deal away Mann to Cuccinelli in private in return for immunity.
I conjecture that once UoV has protected itself, then Cuccinelli’s focus would be strictly on Mann. If I was Cuccinelli, that would have been my strategy all along.
By my conjecture, Cuccinelli would start by investigating Mann’s (not UoV’s) ‘misuse’ of grant funds and it will lead to getting into Mann’s private finances. In my view such public disclosure of Mann’s finances will then lead to . . . . . an oops moment.
Who is going to direct the movie version of this? Curtis?
John
Smokey says:
“Michael Mann is the grant rainmaker. But many of these grants appear to be nothing more than bribes, such as geologist Mann’s $1.8 million gift to study “mosquito vectors”. Ken Cuccinelli is right to investigate the perversion of science that results because the public is forced to fund this hifalutin’-sounding payola”
=====================
That’s a lot of grants. It reminds me of something.
One of the primary missions of the National Science Foundation is to investigate grant fraud. I wonder how many here have heard of this report in 2009. The story was picked up by many news sources at the time, including Scientific American. It explains (in part) why they don’t do their job very well.
Google search for this item:
http://tinyurl.com/22p6hys
Some parts of the story are rather funny, like that senior executive who was addicted to chatting with naked women online (331 days!) and, when he was caught, tried to justify the time spent on this activity by saying he was just trying to help poor women oversees.
The Washington Times broke the story as follows:
—-
Employee misconduct investigations, often involving workers accessing pornography from their government computers, grew sixfold last year inside the taxpayer-funded foundation that doles out billions of dollars of scientific research grants, according to budget documents and other records obtained by The Washington Times.
The problems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) were so pervasive they swamped the agency’s inspector general and forced the internal watchdog to cut back on its primary mission of investigating grant fraud and recovering misspent tax dollars.
“To manage this dramatic increase without an increase in staff required us to significantly reduce our efforts to investigate grant fraud,” the inspector general recently told Congress in a budget request. “We anticipate a significant decline in investigative recoveries and prosecutions in coming years as a direct result.”
The budget request doesn’t state the nature or number of the misconduct cases, but records obtained by The Times through the Freedom of Information Act laid bare the extent of the well-publicized porn problem inside the government-backed foundation.
For instance, one senior executive spent at least 331 days looking at pornography on his government computer and chatting online with nude or partially clad women without being detected, the records show.
When finally caught, the NSF official retired. He even offered, among other explanations, a humanitarian defense, suggesting that he frequented the porn sites to provide a living to the poor overseas women. Investigators put the cost to taxpayers of the senior official’s porn surfing at between $13,800 and about $58,000.
“He explained that these young women are from poor countries and need to make money to help their parents and this site helps them do that,” investigators wrote in a memo.
The independent foundation, funded by taxpayers to the tune of $6 billion in 2008, is tasked with handing out scientific grants to colleges, universities and research institutions nationwide. The projects it funds ranges from mapping the genome of the potato to exploring outer space with powerful new telescopes. It has a total of 1,200 career employees.
Recent budget documents for the inspector general cite a “6-fold increase in employee misconduct cases and associated proactive management implication report activities.” The document doesn’t say how many cases were involved in the increase, and officials could not immediately provide a figure.
[Story Continues]
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/sep/29/workers-porn-surfing-rampant-at-federal-agency/
JDN says:
October 7, 2010 at 8:01 am
Phil. says:
October 7, 2010 at 7:46 am
Does anyone have a complete list (with PI’s) of the grants received for Mann or the Team, the relevant details and how they performed (as in pubs & conferences, etc)? A spreadsheet would do. It would save a lot of time on future discussions.
BTW, I still suspect Mann isn’t getting a huge amount of public money for work he’s proposing to do, given the scope of the proposed work. It would be good to see numbers. Does he get private grants?
It’s freely available on his CV on the PSU website. From the list given above the two largest grants totalling M$2.5 were to PIs other than Mann.
In his revived crusade against UVA and Dr. Mann, AG Cuccinelli is demanding information related to a “study of natural land-vegetation-atmosphere interaction in the African savanna”, according to Mann. Right winger Cuccinelli has jumped the shark as his “investigation” is no longer focused on alleged fraud or misuse of grant funds by Mann. He’s just wasting tax dollars because he didn’t like the fact that he was slapped down by Judge Paul Peatross.
http://www.cavalierdaily.com/2010/10/06/cuccinelli-orders-new-investigation/
Larry Geiger,
“We don’t need a reason to investigate. It’s public money. Anything to do with the grant should be available to investigators at any moment in time.”
Actually, a prosecutor that issues a CID and then seeks to enforce it in court does have to have a reason to investigate. Basically, they have to show some information that fraud was actually committed. They can’t go on a fishing expedition. You may not like it that the law works that way, but it does. Frankly, that’s the way the law should work for criminal investigations. Otherwise, people will be harrassed without cause. Prosecutors will be able to browbeat people into things like confessions of guilt to avoid the harassment. That’s not a society I want to live in.
The AG is citing no evidence of fraud except alleged bad science. The court hasn’t bought that, and is not going to. Sorry.
“Who are you people out there that think that public, taxpayer funded projects cannot, and should not, be audited any time of the day or night by the state or federal government. ”
Well, why is the “auditing” directed at a climate scientist by an AG that is a member of a political party that increasingly opposes the theory of AGW. Why not audit researchers generally. I doubt the IRS would be allowed to audit registered democrats exclusively when republican administrations are in power, or democratic administrations direct the IRS to audit only republicans. This whole thing smells like a giant witch hunt to any judge. The judge has got that, and he’s not going to allow the AG to go forward . SORRY GUYS
Tom Fuller:
Tom, the First Amendment – here involving your own Freedom of Speech and the Press – doesn’t have anything to do with the issue we are discussing, which is the public funding of science, and therefore the issue of the applicability of FOI requests and any other legal audits of the totality of the “work” thereby funded, which themselves are certainly partly designed to oversee the “propriety” of this publically funded work and thus also protect the Public from any potential abuses – including, say, those deriving from a potential unconstitutional alliance between Government and Science which intends to defraud, loot, and control the People, for example by means the grant process itself which then generates “Political” Science instead of real Science.
Why you think any such legal inquiry into a publically funded body of scientific work will somehow end up in your own First Amendment backyard is a mystery to me, except that you seem to be confusing the Scientific Method or process with the advocacy of a personal or political position – which is exactly what is wrong with “Climate Science” and why oversight by the Public is necessary in the case of publically funded science; especially when the other mechanisms available in a free society such as review by “official scientific bodies” – including professional organizations, Publications, and other governmental entities such as the EPA and Congressional Oversight Committees – and also the Press, have not been adequate to slow down the manifestly political nature of Mann’s, enc., Climate Science, which also in a prima facie way, imo, at the very least intends or conspires to either loot or control the Public, or both, thus potentially depriving us of our Constiltutional Civil Rights and liberties.
Regardless, at the very least, although perhaps exactly what this kind of Public oversight turns out to be is yet to be deterimined by working through the actual Legal Process itself, still why you or anyone thinks Mann’s work would or should be a priori exempt from it, is certainly not in any way established, and I don’t see how it has anything to do with your own First Amendment Rights, except perhaps to try to protect them from the potential development of a Totalitarian State.
To be sure. But that post reminded me of the player who is IMHO a lot more to blame than Michael Mann who seems like a jumped-up egotist who has found a nice gravy train to ride. Mann could simply become the fall guy for his sponsors.
IPCC.
The IPCC put Mann onto his pedestal, because he happened to deliver the goods they wanted. But to whom are IPCC answerable, for corrupting the course of science?
Then there is Richard Courtney’s excellent analysis of the unholy feedback involving politicians of all colours and the MSM of all colours in the corruption of science.
When you use tax money (taken by threat of force remember) one should be held to a higher standard, not a lower standard as Mr Fuller seems to desire. On your own dime you can be all the things that the Mann apologists claim and enjoy the privileges and immunities Fuller et al wish to grant.
Well written Mr Patterson!
When I wrote that district attorneys (should have been Attorneys General) are not always Republican, what I should have probably said was that the scientist in the crosshairs may not always be from the well-defended and funded consensus position. I greatly fear that this may serve as a precedent that will be used to marginalize and even silence scientists that publish papers that may offend the majority rather than support it, as in Mann’s case.
It’s too late to worry about silencing “scientists that publish papers that may offend the majority. . . .”
Ask noted astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon, who is being vigorously persecuted for his non-consensus views by Greenpeace, with the full cooperation of Harvard University, whether there is freedom of scientific inquiry in the climate research community. Or fellow professor Sallie Baliunas, who has been subjected to incredible abuse at the hands of fellow “scientists” who will brook no dissent from the official “climate change” doctrine. Today, any professor brave enough to expose the machinations and manipulations of consensus scientists risks public ridicule, ostracism and career suicide.
The notion that Attorney General Cuccinelli’s investigation will stifle scientific freedom is patent nonsense. That freedom, if it ever existed, has been under attack by the global warmist camp for decades. And those attacks continue unabated, aided in no small part by government and university officials who spend most of their time engaging in and covering up scientific malfeasance on a grand scale.
“Protection of scientific freedom”? There is no freedom left to protect.
>>Climate Change Collective Learning and Observatory Network in Ghana: $759,928
It was a 3 year project. That works out at c250K / year to enagge 6 students, a PI and 5 co-PIs, one of whom was Mann. Bargain! If you think research is expensive, you should try ignorance. To list it as ‘Mann’s grant’ does nothing for the credibility of the poster.
This is probably the only issue I agree with T. Fuller on, and I posted as much in the previous thread, but basically to sum it up…
This prosecutor like anyone who gets zealous will end up finding some small technicality and prosecute on that. That is generally how things like this go. As for the fraud, I think its difficult for me to say its that even based on what I know. Beyond reasonable doubt? I do not think so.
Sheer incompetence, yes. He should be fired and have his degrees revoked.. but like I said earlier, its a catch 22 either way. There is no good result that can come from an investigation like this, as the likely precedent will damage science, but in the end, this particular branch of science has opened itself up to this. Science in general will fare terribly like this, which is my largest worry.
But then again, climate science should have policed itself or the universities should have done this, but every step of the way they simply let him be “because he got money well.” or his “message was good”. That is not the litmus test for good science as I think it should be, which in the end may be the largest issue with universities in general, so how this investigation might go will be to change that…But like I said, it will end as a witch trial with Mann getting prosecuted for some small issue that no doubt plauges all universities and with the law interpretating the way it does, just about any professor can be prosecuted like this.
But what else can be done? None of us have any good ways this can be changed without something this drastic, and I admit I do not have any ideas either. Classic Catch 22, your are damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.
Phil. is frantically posting here, trying to excuse all the grant money changing hands with a wink and a nod. Phil. states unequivocally: “Smokey is a liar.” That’s the kind of ad hominem name-calling Phil. makes when his arguments have run out of steam.
The grant amounts posted above came from a number of sources including this article, and a WUWT article and thread specifically written about Mann’s $1.8 million mosquito vector grant here. There’s also this Mann exposé. A search would probably bring up more connections between Mann and his dubious mosquito grant.
Mann also listed the $1.8 million mosquito grant as an accomplishment on his CV:
Mann is a co-investigator [or ‘et al.’] on this grant and many others. Getting listed as a grant recipient gives Mann substantial control over how the cash is spent. Since Mann himself takes credit for the grant, asking questions about it is fair game, no?
Maybe Phil. can try to explain how relaying the information linked in this comment would make anyone a “liar.” How about it, Phil.? Does that really make me a liar? Everything posted is out in the open.
What Phil. is really trying to do is put Mann’s fallen halo back on his head by making news aggregating into a strawman argument.
The grant gravy train generally operates with teams going after the grant money. This is just one grant out of many that Mann lists on his personal CV [under “Funded Proposals“].
Michael Mann brings in a lot more loot than most researchers, but it has nothing to do with his scientific ability. As we seen in the comments here, the argument has devolved into one of only two possibilities: either Michael Mann committed scientific misconduct, or we are told by Mann’s defenders that being incompetent isn’t a crime. So there’s your guy, Phil: a crook, or an incompetent.
Charles Higley says:
October 7, 2010 at 6:14 am (Edit)
If Dr Mann produced the Hockey Stick during his work in Virginia, then he is guilty of fraud. There is absolutely no way that the Hockey Stick graph was produced by innocent manipulation of data. The selectivity impressed on the data and the clearly spurious computer programming used to process the selected data cannot be done by mistake or by normally applied data processing techniques. He had to know that he was crafting a graph that did not honestly represent the data.
#############
be specific.
1. which hockey stick
2. NONE of the hockey sticks has “spurious” computer programing. Did you even LOOK at the code? can you even read it? You will find a smattering of minor errors
in mann’s work. Mistakes that were corrected, but not attributed. egotism, not fraud.
3. Mann’s method’s are opportunistic and not fully vetted. He basically didnt know how to test them. As problems became evident he has moved on to other methods.
4. Data selection: which data? and how is it fraudulent
The people making vague, unspecified, charges on Mann do an absolute disservice to the people who have studied him in detail. If you dont know the case on the science inside and out, I’ll suggest silence. if people took that suggestion then there are probably less than handful of people qualified to speak. And none of them sees fraud. Mistakes are not fraud.
.
Cliff says:
October 7, 2010 at 6:39 am
“Mann at best was wrong, or practiced bad science. The process in science to address that is more science, not criminal investigations and prosecutions.”
I agree.
What science needs is better peer review, such as by blogs like this. That is the court of public opinion, not the courts of unrepresentative lawyers and judges with their own agendas.
Mann also listed the $1.8 million mosquito grant as an accomplishment on his CV:
“Quantifying the influence of environmental temperature on transmission of vector-borne diseases, NSF-EF [Principal Investigator: M. Thomas; Co-Investigators: R.G. Crane, M.E. Mann, A. Read, T. Scott (Penn State Univ.)] $1,884,991″
Mann is a co-investigator [or ‘et al.’] on this grant and many others. Getting listed as a grant recipient gives Mann substantial control over how the cash is spent. Since Mann himself takes credit for the grant, asking questions about it is fair game, no?
Smokey, you have no idea what a PI does on a grant. As a former PI on millions of contracts and studies I will tell you what I PI does: A PI controls All the money.
So, there you go again, you merely assert that mann has control over money, when you know no such thing. When you have people who have served as PIs tell you that the PI controls the budget and the schedule, you ignore evidence that falsifies your theory.
Again, the people who make broad baseless charges demean and belittle the work of their betters who have dissected Mann’s work in detail and found no scientific fraud.
Question: we bemoan the fact that the climategate whitwash commisions did not call steve mcintyre as a witness. we scream that they did not talk to the critic most knowledgable. Well, did the AG here ask steve for the best case he had? no.
why not? because then he couldnt launch a witch hunt.
witch hunt and white wash. neither gets to the truth. And they dont because the reasonable voices are left out of the picture.
Steven Mosher says on October 7, 2010 at 10:48 am
Your hyperbole is excused because I understand and agree with your message, but the problem is that it is not about the science. Those on the AGW side long ago saw that they could not use the scientific method to achieve their goals so they moved to the political and media spheres to do that.
It then became an arms race. Those on the other side found a bigger hammer, and so forth.
Important point, Steve. But there IS an issue of integrity where, because of the nonexistence of adequate protective legislation, Mann is able to wrap the whole world round his little finger. I can stand in my integrity and be a pacifist. But I cannot condemn others who in their deeply-considered integrity feel it is right for them to fight fire with fire. Nor can I prevent those who, from a more shallow integrity feel it is right to fight. I have to work with the total situation. I can go in as Red Cross to help put the members of all sides of the dispute together again, in a more just framework.
How about we reconsider the culpability of the IPCC in allowing Mann to deal such harm to Science. And how about we consider how to move out of blame altogether, and focus on how to rebuild. And if Mann needs to be “taken out” for such reconsideration by using battle tactics, perhaps that would be good, so long as his eventual welfare is built into the reconsideration process. No revenge. No 10:10. Just lessons learned.
Fantastic piece. As a contracts professional, I fully support this investigation. Public funds are a public trust! If you believe you should not be subject to additional scrutiny, then don’t accept government funding.