The subpoena of the week was filed by Virginia’s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, against the University of Virginia. Cuccinelli demands to see the work product — emails and other documentation — of one of the august institution’s former professors, Michael Mann, a well-known advocate of global warming catastrophism. He was one of those whose emails with British climatologists outed him as a savvy, perhaps fraudulent manipulator of data.
The attorney general filed the demand for information under the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, which allows the state to prosecute and receive damages from employees and vendors who make false claims for payment, or submit false records in a contract with the state, or defraud the state.
Former Professor Michael Mann proudly confessed, in his most notorious email, to fiddling with the data to concoct the infamous “hockey stick” graph of global warming. Now he insists that everything he did was legit. His critics counter that his treatment of the data was deliberately propagandistic, not scientific at all.
But did it amount to fraud?
It’s some kind of fraud, surely. But is it less than the legal real deal or is it, as Whoopi Goldberg might put it, “fraud fraud”?
Well, I guess that’s why the attorney general is fishing: To find out.
Predictably, Mann and other academics have protested the investigation. It will have a chilling effect on research, they say.
Well, if it has a chilling effect on fraudulent research, all to the good, I say.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
8 replies on “Is It Fraud Fraud?”
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He has a right to do all kinds of data manipulation and spin to the media. But not on the taxpayers $.
Wish we could hold the White House to the same standard.
“Fraud fraud”? — In a word, YES.
Did Dr. Mann profit from publishing data that he knew were faked? YES
Did he try to destroy the evidence? YES.
So Dr. Mann perpetrated a fraud, knew it at the time, and knows it now. “Fraud fraud”? — Obviously.
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The false graphs and projections published by Mann and other pseudoscientists formed much of the basis for the court ruling that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that the EPA must regulate. Therefore, Mann’s fraud affected the state. Mann is a salaried employee of the state of Virginia, so he was paid by Virginia taxpayers while perpetrating this fraud. I hope the state Attorney General finds enough evidence to convict.
I’m waiting them to charge Al Gore for the same fraud involving his oscar-winning movie. It will probably be a cold day in hell before they do, but that will undoubtedly alleviate that global warming! The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. –H. L. Mencken
Mister Mann, in concert with the likes of the poofterish and moronic second-generation traitor, Al-Fredo Gore-leone, vanguards a projected (by them!) TWELVE TRILLION ANNUAL DOLLARS “carbon-trading” FRAUD and one has to wonder if it’s a fraud, fraud?
One wonders if the question’s author has a brain, brain.