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Virginia AG Probing Michael Mann For Fraud
eldavojohn writes "Republican Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has requested receipts and research documents relating to nearly half a million dollars in state taxpayer money used to conduct climate change research at the University of Virginia while under direction of Michael Mann, originator of the famous 2001 IPCC Hockey Stick graph depicting rapid climate change. Mann appears to be a prime target for Cuccinelli — who has also requested hearings with the EPA to contest the grounds of their carbon dioxide studies. Mann's expenditures of taxpayer money may become problematic if Cuccinelli finds violations of Virginia's Fraud Against Taxpayers Act. Cuccinelli has been active in pushing conservative views in the past, including an effort to remove the titillating mammary from the beloved Great Seal of Virginia. No end in sight for the politicizing of the science and research surrounding climate change."
He's also the asshole that told all the public universities in Virginia they could no longer have policies of non-discrimination towards gays.
Stay classy.
This is but one of many shenanigans the new Virginia AG is involved in.
sPh
He's also the asshole that told all the public universities in Virginia they could no longer have policies of non-discrimination towards gays.
Stay classy.
Well, I live in Northern Virginia by DC so I'm painfully aware of his policies. In 2004, as a State Senator in Virginia's Senate, he stated "Homosexuality is wrong." This was in regards to a bill that would be introduced to add homosexuality under hate crime legislation after a particularly disturbing case. Cuccinelli vowed to fight any extension of gay rights. He would be reelected in 2007 and appointed as Attorney General this year.
Your fancy logic is no use here, this is politics. You have to disprove Cuccinelli's belief that "homosexuality is wrong" and his apparent reinforcement that it moves him up the voting chain so the populace agrees. Good luck, I sometimes have to interact with these people and often just sidestep any conversation in regards to gay rights (trust me, it's not worth it).
It doesn't end at gay rights either.
My work here is dung.
The motto on the Great Seal of Virginia is "Sic Semper Tyrannis". It means "thus always to yyrants" and was attributed to Brutus after stabbing Caesar and was also what John Wilkes Booth said after murdering Lincoln. Timothy McVeigh was wearing the motto (with a picture of Lincoln, not the VA seal) when we was arrested.
That (now) hateful phrase remains on the seal, but at least the cartoon titty is gone.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Just one quick point: you made up most of that yourself. The others, like the myth of "scientists 30 years ago" predicting another ice age, is pretty heavily debunked, and if you were interested in the truth at all, you'd know it.
Well, for what it's worth, Michael Mann and a few others contribute regularly to the arguably political website known as Real Climate, a website which isn't exactly known to allow dissenting views.
By their own words, the site was organized to provide immediate spin/response (you pick) to media stories on the subject of AGW... much like any other environmental organization does for topics that relate to their own specific causes... organizations that most folks do not hesitate to label as political in nature.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Oh, and he apparently doesn't like our state seal, either.
No, it means the amount warming was low enough to possibly be explained by natural causes, by chance. We know that significant warming did occur. Again, we would expect to see no statistically significant warming every so often. At a 95% confidence interval, we would expect it 1 out of 20 times. For this same reason, 1 in 20 scientific papers reaches the wrong conclusion, because what you would expect to happen due to chance sometimes doesn't happen, or conversely, what you would expect to happen doesn't happen due to chance.
The bottom line is that you cannot do statistics on a sample of one. This is why repeatability of experiments is so important in science. If we continue to see periods of no statistically significant warming, then you've got something interesting and not just a chance event.
The way I see it, the cherry picking of data should have been the focus of climate gate, which was only slightly touched upon with the "hide the decline" part.
I remember a bit more. The expert correctly calculated that the least squares fit to the specified interval had a positive slope, but enough variance that it was only significant at like a 94% confidence level, so it didn't quite meet a 95% confidence level. (To reach that you would have to include *gasp* 11 years, or start a 10 year interval one year earlier or later). Of course, that's statistical significance rather than "importance" - it's perfectly possible to have not quite statistically significant evidence (like, 18.5:1 odds of something being true rather than the usual 19:1) of something important (trajectory of a killer asteroids or whatever), or overwhelming evidence of something trivial (you are reading a post from some AC!)
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1
Fusion is awfully damn hard. The easiest proposals depend on a magnetic bottle we don't know how to build surrounded by perfect shielding that we don't know how to make (it has to capture nearly every neutron released by the fusion reaction and use it to convert lithium into tritium; you can make the tritium in a fission reactor, but getting enough of it that way would cost about $100 million a week at today's prices. Once you have the tritium, you have to make sure you use damn near all of it, and hydrogen has a fun habit of leaking.).
Laser pinches offer a different path to fusion, but they also need a lot of fuel, about 90,000 pellets a day. Current facilities make about 6 pellets a year, at a cost of $1 million per.
Lest you think I am just some crank making stuff up, this is from a Scientific American article published in March (sorry about the paywall):
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fusions-false-dawn
And those are just the fuel problems.
That doesn't mean it is impossible, but we aren't anywhere close, even though we are close to technical breakeven (where a reaction releases more energy than was used to initiate it).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Of course the earth eventually will have another ice age. Those tend to come up now and then. Anthropogenic global cooling due to aerosols is something entirely different, and that's the subject here.
There was an article in Time magazine about it 40 years ago.
If there were not a several hundred papers in peer reviewed ISI journals proving (or even raising the possibility) that an ice age was on the doorstep, then it can hardly be said that anything approaching the current consensus on warming existed, can it? Can you cite several hundred? Can you cite one hundred? How about a dozen? Half a dozen ...
No you can't! And you can't because the notion that any consensus existed in the 70s (or 80s) among expert scientists that an ice age was imminent is a myth. Or, to call a spade a spade, it's a lie.
Now it's true that some scientists mused about the possibility (after all 3 were quoted in the Newsweek article). And you know one the bases for their concern? It was the that relative to the emerging paleo record, the C20th showed unusually pronounced warming. It looked like we were a the peak of a cycle! Now, of course, we know exactly why that warming had taken place.
So how can you say it was a myth?
Easy. There was an article in Time magazine (or Newsweek) about it! :P
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
The thing is, it was settled science by the 70s, so it's not surprising that you wouldn't find many articles about the topic.
In that case why does the disinformation machine sprout the line about scientists arguing for an imminent ice age in the 70s, rather than say the 40s? If they were then surely there should be some literature. The clear implication being made is that a majority of experts in the 70s believed an ice age was approaching (quickly). The facts, as you cited them 7 papers predicting cooling, 44 warming give the lie to that.
Secondly, while Milankovitch obviously did his work earlier (he died in 1958), it is far from true that even the periodic nature of glacials, and how those periods are determined, was "settled science" by the 70s. The work on ice ages was very alive in the 70s (you'll find more than 7 papers which don't predict an "immient" ice age) and certainly not settled until after the publication of this paper in 1976.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Mann did invite a lot of criticism by not opening his data when people asked him for it. I'm referring of course to the issues with the bristlecone pine and his convolution of several sets of temperature proxies. I haven't heard of any evidence that Mann is involved in any fraud though, but witch hunts by their very nature never come up empty-handed. This one won't either.
I think you're confusing Michael E. Mann, who conducted some research based on climate data with the CRU which actually publishes some of the data.
The controversy in that case was just this: CRU publishes a compilation of recent near-surface temperature, in association with the Hadley Centre. This is made up of data from various national meteorological agencies, which is processed to remove local noise and variations (urban heat island effect, moving of weather stations, etc), gridded and used to produce global surface temperature records.
The end-product of CRU's record was always available in public. What was controversial was that some of the national weather agencies' records couldn't be released because those agencies had copyright over the data, and were selling it commercially. There's also a possibility that the CRU scientists used copyright as an excuse to spite those who were using FOIA requests to harass them (as they saw it, and I for one don't blame them - requesting data you have no intention of using, for the sole purpose of making a noise about it, whether it's released or not is disingenuous at best).
In any case, pretty much all of the actual data, barring a few stations, was in the public domain long before the FOIA requests - those making the requests just couldn't get as much political mileage out of public domain data. You can still find all that data by going to RealClimate
Michael Mann, on the other hand, is a researcher who worked on the "hockey stick" graph - a consolidation of various paleoclimate data, collected from proxies like tree rings and ice cores. He and his co-authors overlaid several paleoclimate reconstructions over each other, to show how well they correlated, and found that they all correlated pretty well, and showed a marked rise in temperature during the industrial era. One controversy with this data is that they added instrument records (that is, the CRU temperature series) to the end of the chart (which you can see as the black line in the image), which shows more warming in recent times. Another is that one proxy (tree ring data) shows a decline in the proxy measurement (tree ring width) from the 1960s onwards, which on the face of it, should imply that temperatures are declining, but which no other data, including all the various instrument data show. Mann used a statistical trick of stopping the tree ring data with the 60s and tacking on the instrument data, a technique some people disagree with.
Anyway, the point is, none of Michael Mann's data was ever hidden away
Well, yes, that is flamebait. Global warming was politicized long before Al Gore came along - however his success pushed it into the area of public conversation, and then it because more recognizable to a lot of people.
While I don't claim this piece is unbiased, it is _very_ informative on the politics behind global warming campaigning. It's also quite a few years old and possibly out of date, but certainly enlightening nonetheless. I recommend you have a look.
http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/denialmachine/index.html
Now back to our regular topic, which has nothing at all to do with any of this post...
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State AGs do this on a regular basis. If they see something that they believe could become contentious, whether it be a law or a court ruling, they'll often issue a legal opinion to provide guidance on how to implement the matter before being formally asked to do so in order to minimize any delay. California's AGs, both Democrat and Republican, have been doing it for as long as I can remember and I've heard of numerous other states' AGs that have done similar things.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The vast majority of that overpopulation is in poor areas of the world where the CO2 output is fairly low, the western nations that produce all that pollution have very low growth or even declining populations.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Does the US have a concept of parliamentary privilege?
Is said republican willing to details his accusations of fraud outside of a legislative chamber?
What's the test for defamation in Virginia? Accusing someone's lifelong work of fraud in front of the world's media could potentially be libelous (IANAL).
I think you missed out on what the AG is. It is the duty of the Attorney General to investigate fraud and missuse of public money. Is this a witch hunt? Probably, but that doesn't mean he worng to investigate the claim of fraud.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
It's been interesting to hear the narrative pushed at you from the wingnuts, you mean? Because the first notable paper on global warming, by Plass in 1956, was called “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change”.
But apropos spin...
Who wrote that? Republican strategist for the Bush administration, Frank Luntz, in 2002.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
it has been interesting to watch the spin doctors morph AGW into what I think is a more likely and accurate way to put it - "climate change". Something Earth has experienced for its entire existence.
"Global warming" is an accurate term - it was meant to refer to the global mean temperature increasing. The problem was that many non-scientists don't understand how mean values are calculated, and hence didn't understand that the mean could increase even though some regions might cool. The myth that Any Cooling Disproves Global Warming became widespread, and so scientists began to talk about "climate change" instead.
The reason that many people use any cooling as "disproof" of Global Warming is because proponents of AGW have use any warming as "proof" of Global Warming.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
"It's been interesting to hear the narrative pushed at you from the wingnuts, you mean? Because the first notable paper on global warming, by Plass in 1956, was called “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change”."
Personally, in these cases I refer them to Svante Arrhenius, who had calculated that doubling CO2 level raises temperature by 4-5C. In 1908.
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm