Tag: Michael Mann

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Accountability national politics & policies

Mann FOIA Dump

Michael Mann’s Last of the Mohicans was a great film.

But the work of Michael Mann the climatologist?

Quite another story.

He’s the biggest name behind the much-disputed “hockey stick” graph of world temperatures — the “hockey stick” being the shape of the upward temperature spike in recent times. Mann was also one of the biggest offenders in the Climategate scandal, where emails showed more politicking than objectivity going into how climate models were concocted and presented to the public.

In May, a Virginia state judge ordered the University of Virginia to release Mann’s data and emails under the state’s Freedom of Information Act. Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and the American Tradition Institute (ATI), smelling something fishy in Mann’s work, sued for access to the basic data. ATI now has a disk with info, saying the info dump is about a third of what they requested.

ATI folks haven’t had time to study the data.

Mann has been exonerated from the charge of “research misconduct” by the National Science Foundation — the organization found no “direct evidence” of “data fabrication or data falsification.” Still, Mann’s obvious bias continues to do more than raise eyebrows.

Ronald Bailey, who reports on all this for Reason, yearns to make FOIA battles superfluous. He urges “publicly funded researchers” to place their raw data up on the Internet for public testing — true transparency (and completely in the spirit of scientific method).

Well, that might happen . . . after a few more FOIA battles.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability

Is It Fraud Fraud?

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.