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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."
This is but one of many shenanigans the new Virginia AG is involved in.
sPh
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?
Have you actually read the opinion? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/Cuccinelli.pdf
He's telling the public universities that, in his opinion, they don't have the authority to have those sorts of policies unless specifically authorized by the General Assembly. Previous AGs have said the same thing. Part of his job is to provide legal advice, which is exactly what he did.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1
Just to add a little to your response. At best - yes I've read the actual studies myself - genetics and biology account for about 20% of the variance in homosexuality (and about 50% of studies find that genetics is a significant factor in homosexuality and 50% do not). In other words, even assuming that studies that show a significant biological contributor to homosexuality (that also assumes that biology predated the attitudes/feelings/behaviors) that either biological factors that we do not understand yet or, more likely, psychosocial factors are responsible for one being homosexual.
This means that things in people's lives - choices they made or things that happened to them and how they reacted to those things - are mainly responsible for homosexuality. Biology plays a role, just as it does in just about everything, but it is not the main "cause" (if we want to use that word) of homosexuality.
If anyone wants citations, I can look them up. Just respond to this post and I'll get back to you.
The opinion is remarkably poor legal advice, as it fails to account for the relevant differences between local governments and universities and does not speak to the general grants of authority given to Virginia universities to craft their own rules.
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
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.
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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"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