Well that was fast.
You may or may not have heard of Dr. Edward Wegman, a statistics professor at George Mason University, who got in very hot water a few years ago on well-founded charges of plagiarism. Wegman is most famously known for the "Wegman Report", which was commissioned in 2006 by Congressional Republicans to look into Michael Mann's famous "hockey stick" paleoclimate research. Wegman (and his report) concluded that Mann's work was flawed. But as it turned out, large parts of the Wegman Report were plagiarized, as was widely reported in USA Today and other sources. The evidence for plagiarism in the Wegman Report, and also in at least two peer-reviewed papers of Wegman and his colleague Yasmin Said, was uncovered in excruciating (and damning) detail by citizen journalist John Mashey, who currently writes for that invaluable environmental crusader, DeSmog Blog.
On March 24, after an entire year of secret preparation, Wegman and Said sued John Mashey for $2 million, citing the damage his honest reportage had caused to their careers. (Seriously, you can't make this stuff up.) And who was their lawyer in this quest? Milt Johns, former law partner of uber-climate-denier (and uber-jerk) Ken Cuccinelli, the ex-Virginia Attorney General who spent his brief term in office more interested in suing climate scientists than in prosecuting criminals.
But on April 30, just five weeks after filing the suit, Johns showed up in court to drop the suit, and the day after that, Johns was out of a job, having parted ways with his ex-partners in the firm of Day & Johns (which will now certainly have a new name).
The tangled web of this bizarre story is below the fold.
When Michael Mann published his famous "hockey stick" studies of climate during the past 1000 years, it was an eye-opener for a lot of people. Not only was our climate changing, but it was changing more rapidly, and had risen to higher temperatures, than any time during the past millenium. Mann's work (in 1998 and 1999) was groundbreaking; nothing quite like it had been done before. Since that time, more than a dozen similar studies have confirmed the central thesis of the Hockey Stick, that our current warming is unprecedented in both speed and magnitude during the past few centuries at least.
But this wide scientific acceptance drove some climate deniers right off the end of the looney pier. The Hockey Stick must be debunked!, they cried. And to their defense came a couple of non-climate non-scientists, miner Steve McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick, who published a paper pointing out a flaw in Mann's statistics. Now the flaw was trivial and wouldn't have changed Mann's conclusions one bit (as the National Academy of Sciences later determined). But the flaw was enough for some people.
Enter climate denier congressman Joe Barton (R-TX) who wanted to hold a congressional hearing for the specific purpose of sticking it to the hockey stick. To give the hearing a patina of respectability, Barton hired GMU statistics prof Wegman to give him an official-looking report to confirm that the hockey stick was bogus. Wegman, along with co-author Said, did what he was paid to do and produced the skeptical report, which was duly read into the Congressional Record.
If you've ever heard the claim from the denier crowd that "random noise", if put into Mann's algorithm, produces hockey sticks, the Wegman Report is where that canard came from. Wegman took McIntyre's code and ran it without looking at it very closely, and made that claim in his report. The claim is totally bogus. McIntyre's program generated 10,000 random time series, and then selected the 100 most hockey-stick-like series (top 1%) for further analysis. Wegman had no idea that he was falling into that trap, and this uncorrected error still persists today.
But even worse, much of Wegman's report turned out to be a very sloppy cut-and-paste job using existing sources, including (believe it or not) Wikipedia. In other words, something you'd expect of a naive freshman who doesn't know any better, but not a full professor who certainly should. The plagiarism was first noted by Canadian blogger Deep Climate, but John Mashey soon followed up in extensive detail (see links above) with various and sundry episodes of plagiarism on the part of Wegman and Said, including in peer-reviewed publications that were subsequently withdrawn by their journals.
Some of the scholars whose work was plagiarized by Wegman complained to GMU, which responded in a fashion you might expect for a university so heavily dependent on Koch Brothers money: they changed their complaint procedures to make them less open and more opaque. It is still unclear whether or not GMU has taken any action at all against Wegman, even though at least some of his plagiarized publications were written under government contract, which (theoretically, at least) might put all of GMU's government-contract scholarship in jeopardy. Does GMU actually have academic oversight authority over its professors? Who knows? Because they're certainly not telling.
Wegman and Said did lose their editorial positions at a the journal WIREs Computational Statistics. But publisher Wiley has also been stonewalling that process too.
So now here we are in 2015, with Wegman and Said in professional disgrace, and certainly having lost out on a lot of government contract "research" grants. So what do they do? Well obviously, displaying those conservative values of taking personal responsibility, they sue Mashey for loss of contract income, because he told the truth on them. Seriously.
Such a lawsuit could not have been filed unless a lawyer advised them that they really had a case. To do otherwise would be a violation of legal ethics. And who was the lawyer who advised Wegman? None other than GMU grad Milt Johns, partner of Day & Johns, the same firm that was formerly known as Cuccinelli & Day, before Ken Cuccinelli quit to be the most climate-denyin' Attorney General in Virginia history, filing suits and FOIA demands attacking Mann (among others).
But Day & Johns, it seems, is no more, because Milt Johns left Day & Johns just one day after dropping the bizarre suit against Mashey. A week later he had a job at Fluet Huber & Hoang. Thus he has gone from named partner in a small firm to unnamed partner in a giant firm. This is the reverse of the path a successful attorney usually takes in his career.
One can only speculate as to what really transpired here, but the simplest explanation is that when Johns' partners at Day & Johns got around to taking a serious look at the suit, they hit the roof. They're a small firm and it's doubtful they have pockets deep enough to subsidize what was certain to be an expensive action that had zero possibility of success. Most likely they gave Johns the boot, possibly holding the threat of ethical sanctioning over his head to get him out the door.
Finally, I should mention that Mashey was aided by the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, a group well worth your donations.