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Judge Quashes Subpoena of UVA Research Records
esocid writes "An Albemarle County Circuit Court judge has set aside a subpoena issued by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to the University of Virginia seeking documents related to the work of climate scientist and former university professor Michael Mann. Judge Paul M. Peatross Jr. ruled that Cuccinelli can investigate whether fraud has occurred in university grants, as the attorney general had contended, but ruled that Cuccinelli's subpoena failed to state a 'reason to believe' that Mann had committed fraud. He also set aside the subpoena without prejudice, meaning Cuccinelli can rewrite it to better explain why he wants to investigate, but seemed skeptical about the underlying claim of fraud. The ruling is a major blow for Cuccinelli, a global warming skeptic who had maintained he was investigating whether Mann committed fraud in seeking government money for research that showed the earth has experienced a rapid, recent warming. Mann, now at Penn State University, worked at U-Va. until 2005. 'The Court has read with care those pages and understands the controversy regarding Dr. Mann's work on the issue of global warming. However, it is not clear what he did was misleading, false or fraudulent in obtaining funds from the Commonwealth of Virginia,' Peatross wrote. The ruling also limited Cuccinelli to asking about only one of the five grants issued, which was the only one using state funds."
Michael Mann published a graph which suddenly stops reporting data for a trend line that runs counter to his conclusion.
If you have every used Excel to create a graph, it's obvious that either A) you are missing a bunch of data (nearly criminal oversight for a scientist) for the missing trend line, or B) You deliberately removed the data line
Q: How can one carefully read on this and conclude there is no evidence?
A: You arrived at a predetermined conclusion (probably based on political affiliation)!
Naturally, I expect this to be modded to oblivion by people with the same affiliation.
A) The cat's already out of the bag, so it's sort of silly to think this is an effort to silence Mr. Mann.
B) It is interesting (and very bigoted of you) to assume anyone who is a AGW skptic is anti-science and pro-intelligent design. You should be on TV. That leap in logic would get you over the Grand Canyon.
The judge knows full well, if he authorizes a fishing expedition against Michael Mann, he'll have the wrath of the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, et al., directed against him, with the full complicity of the current administration, especially after they worked so hard to ignore the story, or bury it as deep as possible. After all, we can't allow facts to interfere with such a ripe target for government intervention, can we? Never mind so many other such expeditions which were cheered by the Fifth Column journos, when their enemies were the ones being investigated.
The reality is that Michael Mann's data was put through a linear transformation and then a principal components analysis that resulted in a very convoluted fabrication of the global warming effect, but a fabrication nonetheless. If there was someone using political means to further their career it was Mann, not this Cuccinelli guy. The result was that if you put any red noise through Mann's filters you get identical data. Basically it is all a con, and I only expect the seasoned, educated readers of Slashdot to understand the implications of the fact that any red noise could recreate the warming trends. Moreover, the entire case for global warming (now modified to the ever more scary "climate change") is a distraction so that politicians and those people who are connected can install and profit from a carbon credit scheme. Wholly ignored in the climate change idiocy are the real environmental problems of pollution, habitat destruction and the planned de-industrialization of our country. In fact, blathering about climate change and CO2 (which is plant food) simply empowers the oligopolies to pollute at will. Please wake up.
If the government, any member of it even, requires a subpoena to attain research documents from a government funded study - there was fraud.
... and apparently you have no qualms about the possibility that someone wasted even more government money. Then again, that seems to be par for the course in the global warming religion. :)
So transpanency rules except when it has to deal with global warming. Wikileaks is to be honored, yet research records concerning global warming should be protected from the public eye at all costs. Makes perfect sense. I can't stand right wingers, but the blatant liberal agenda is just as nausiating.
Hide the Decline.
Its nice to see mods that don't mod based on political bias. [/sarcasm]
+1 insightful for someone that didn't even read the summary? Really?
The -1 to me obviously makes his opinion more valid as well. Mhmmm.
people outside of broad academia try to jump in and play politics with the conduct of research ...Openness is great in principle, but...Openness is great in principle
What exactly are Al Gore's scientific credentials? He has a journalism degree, childhood was basically no different than a trust-fund baby and according to Wikipedia he did poorly in science and math classes at Harvard. Except for his stance on AGW, he would be ridiculed beyond belief on Slashdot because if this resumé.
In almost all other disciplines, Slashdotters tend to prefer the experts to be experts in a field. But for climate research, experts can be anyone involved in any field at all, regardless of how little that field actually contributes to meteorology and climate otherwise.
Not necessarily. The climategate scandal was really about climatologists hiding their data and methods from critical review. This is not how science should be conducted, and certainly not in a science whose entire basis rests on certain sets of data and methods used to analyze them. Instead Phil emailed his colleagues on tricks for ducking out of having to respond to FOIA requests - the emails are all there in the climategate archives. Including emails to people like Gavin (of RC.org fame) who apparently didn't seem at all perturbed by the attempts to hide data, only reversing his stance when climategate broke and posting (other) data sets on RC.org.
The various Mc's have found modest errors before, and have been cited in the literature for it. But when they request the same data that Jones or Mann gets so they can run the numbers themselves, they get rebuffed.
Or to put it in Phil Jones' words: "Why should I give you the data when you might use it to prove me wrong?"
Bad, bad science, and he was rightfully slapped down for it.
As you are well aware, Mann has been repeatedly investigated by political hacks and repeatedly cleared
Really? I was under the impression that his work has recently been falsified, in the scientific meaning of the word, by expert statisticians. It's doubtful that he didn't know his work didn't hold up to scrutiny these last few years (since M&M at least) and thus there's plenty of reason to believe he's been accepting grant money under false premises.
http://www.e-publications.org/ims/submission/index.php/AOAS/user/submissionFile/6695?confirm=63ebfddf
it's in my head