With all the absurdity going on with the collapse of the Euro zone, the horrendous oil spill, Arizona, who does the Virginia AG Ken Cuccinell think is his most important enemies du jour?
Climate scientists!
This is un-freaking real...
No one can accuse Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli of shying from controversy. In his first four months in office, Cuccinelli directed public universities to remove sexual orientation from their anti-discrimination policies, attacked the Environmental Protection Agency, and filed a lawsuit challenging federal health care reform. Now, it appears, he may be preparing a legal assault on an embattled proponent of global warming theory who used to teach at the University of Virginia, Michael Mann.
In papers sent to UVA April 23, Cuccinelli’s office commands the university to produce a sweeping swath of documents relating to Mann’s receipt of nearly half a million dollars in state grant-funded climate research conducted while Mann— now director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State— was at UVA between 1999 and 2005.
If Cuccinelli succeeds in finding a smoking gun like the purloined emails that led to the international scandal dubbed Climategate, Cuccinelli could seek the return of all the research money, legal fees, and trebled damages.
"Since it’s public money, there’s enough controversy to look in to the possible manipulation of data," says Dr. Charles Battig, president of the nonprofit Piedmont Chapter Virginia Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment, a group that doubts the underpinnings of climate change theory
Mann is the guy who created the famous "Hockey Stick" graph which extrapolated temperatures based on correlates of previous temperatures. It's a very reasonable statistical method. However, some disputed Mann's calculations...
This dispute centered on technical aspects of the methodology and data sets used in creating the reconstruction, originally raised by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick.[7] Their criticisms were that Mann et al.'s reconstructed millennial temperature graph (the hockey stick) was an artifact of flawed calculations and serious data defects; in turn, MBH replied that these criticisms were spurious.
The dispute eventually led to an investigation at the behest of U.S. Congress by a panel of scientists convened by the National Research Council (NRC) of the United States National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to consider reconstructions of the last 2000 years in general; in addition, an investigation was performed at the behest of Congressman Joe Barton by a panel of three statisticians, chaired by Edward Wegman specifically addressing the MBH work. Both the NRC and Wegman teams issued reports in 2006.
The graph on the right shows the data from MBH98 and from several other climate reconstructions, subsequent to the 1998 reconstruction. Two of the other temperature reconstructions included on the graph are by Mann and co-authors.
More than twelve subsequent scientific papers using various statistical techniques and combinations of proxy records produced reconstructions broadly the same as the original hockey stick graphs, with variations in the extent to which the Medieval Warm Period and subsequent "little ice age" were significant, but almost all of them supported the IPCC conclusion that the warmest decade in 1000 years was probably that at the end of the 20th century. There have also been disputes about the use of Bristlecone and Foxtail Pine tree rings as temperature proxies — the National Research Council report recommends that "strip-bark" samples be avoided for temperature reconstructions[8] – but the same "hockey stick" graph is found in studies which do not use tree ring proxies.[6]
Eventually, in 2004, Mann et al. published a corrigendum, correcting some of the calculations. The conclusions, of course, were the same: there is anthropogenic (man-made) global warming. Duh.
This is ridiculous, and is nothing but an attempt to intimidate scientists.
That famous saying, "First they came for X... then they came for Y..."
Gays. Non-Christians. Immigrants...and now...scientists?
Do they have recall elections in Virginia?
'Cause that guy's got to go.