Let’s say you’re Michael Mann, widely respected in the field of climatology, widely reviled by global warming skeptics for suggesting strongly that it’s hotter now on Earth than it has been for thousands of years at the least and doing so with a upticked graph dubbed the hockey stick. One skeptic with statistical savvy even pointed out a systematic analysis error in earlier renditions of the plot. It stayed pretty much the same after correction. But the chink is one reason Mann remains high on the denialist side’s list of scientists who are somehow or other devilishly bamboozling the public by insisting, via data, that anthropogenic warming is the real deal.

Now, all of a sudden in Mann’s already hectic life, the Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has hit the University of Virginia – where Mann, now at Penn State, worked until 2005 – with a demand for a pile of his records, emails, and other stuff that might support a case that Mann et al and the university defrauded the government through misuse of research grant money.Yikes – here’s a credentialed scientist, his work widely lauded by the bulk of colleagues in his field, entrained in what amounts to a criminal fraud investigation. He’s already living with constant hate mail and demands under Freedom of Information Act rules for tons of his background documents. Now this. If you’re Michael Mann, you are beyond fed up.

Thanks to the sharper eyes of Jeff Tollefson at Nature’s The Great Beyond blog and science news analysis site, I learn the news broke first last Thursday in a Charlottesville weekly, The Hook, in a piece by Courteney Stuart. Ms. Stuart did a commendable, well-informed job of tracing the controversy’s history, collecting commentary from people of varied perspective, and providing links to further, illuminating reading.

From there the news’s distribution has ascended a ladder from smaller, to major outlets. Stories include:

• Charlottesville Daily Progress – Brian McNeill (Fri. Apr. 30) : Attorney General demands UVa climate papers ; Pretty short piece, but starts by noting that the AG has a history of going after global warming theory, and regulation of it, in court.
• Slate – Dahlia Lithwick: Suing Science / Virginia’s Ken Cuccinelli’s dangerous suite against climate change (May 4); Excellent context and perspective on the AG’s other forays into territories offices like his seldom enter. And a serious quote from an advocate for free inquiry by professors: “With a weapon like this in Cuccinelli’s hands, any faculty members at a public university has got to be thinking twice about doing politically controversial research…”
• AAAS ScienceInsider – Eli Kintisch: Virginia Official Wades Into U.K. Climate Investigation ; This is the piece that drew The Tracker’s eye to this affair. Kintisch dug up one bona fide denialist who is nonetheless appalled by the AG’s effort to find a crime in mainstream climate science.
• USA Today (Science Fair ) Dan Vergano (May 4): Science group: Climate science ‘witch hunt’ underway in Virginia ; Vergano called Mann. Officially, Mann tells him, he’s not in the AG’s crosshairs – his old employers are.
• US News & World Report (Thomas Jefferson Street blog) – John Aloysius Farrell (May 4) : Virginia Attorney General Goes on Climategate Witch Hunt at UVA ; A biting opinion piece that ridicules the AG and explains forcefully the growing disconnect between many powerful political elements of US society and understanding of science. This is so good I take back most of my thoughts about USNews’s recent departure and decline from the ranks of serious, broad-based news weeklies – thoughts not coincidental in origin to the day the magazine told me I better leave (which it was telling most of the rest of its science writing corps. ) Smartest move in this piece – Farrell says if Virginia insists in dumbing down UVA and William&Mary and Virginia Tech etc., plenty of other states – North Carolina for one with Duke and UNC and more – will be happy to pick up the slack.

WAIT, THERE’s MORE. For further context on Virginia and climate change political science:

• American Thinker – S. Fred Singer: ClimateGate Whitewash: That’s right, old timers on the environmental and climate beat. Fred Singer, who for years was nearly a voice in the wilderness insisting that global warming is a mere myth, a former director of the US Weather Satellite Service and professor emeritus at UVA, is still at it. He thinks Mann and his like, so far, have not been slapped nearly hard enough. I bet he’s real popular in the faculty club.

No longer just torches and pitchforks – Pic of Heroic Tank-riding Skeptics;  Source. One is unsure of the Aussie connection.

- Charlie Petit

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