Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, in a blatantly political move to help strengthen his support among the right wing for his bid to become the next governor, is causing uproar in the science community by investigating climate scientist and former University of Virginia professor Michael Mann.That's from a blog but I keep finding the same "...in a blatantly political move to help strengthen his support among the right wing..." line over and over, handled as a straight statement of fact.
Yeah. He couldn't possibly be concerned that they've been playing fast and loose with the numbers, doing the Chicken Little dance to get funding while real issues -- poverty, hunger, unwelcome groping by politicians, looming national bankruptcy and even that thing no politician, no matter how noble or depraved, can ever bring him or herself to do, leaving people the hell alone -- languish, ignored. Oh, hells no.
Hold yer damn opinions but have the decency t'own them.
Oh, and by the way? The sky is not burning.
Ken Cuccinelli is a class act, makes me proud to hail from Virginia!
ReplyDelete-Scott
Steve McIntyre (the guy who blew Mann's Hockey Stick out of the water) has a very interesting Youtube preso that sums up the last few years or so of this brouhaha.
ReplyDeleteAll in all, though, I'd say that the last thing we need is more politics in Climate Science. Got all we can use, thank you very much. I don't see that Cuccinelli will make anything better here.
WV: pressers. What half of the "peer reviewed science" in the IPCC report turned out to be ...
Cooch doesn't NEED to strengthen his support in the right wing. The powers that be are worried that he'll get drafted for governor in the next election.
ReplyDeleteI love the policy statement by the University of Virginia which ended with:
ReplyDelete"We maintain that peer review by the scientific community is the appropriate means by which to identify error in the generation, presentation and interpretation of scientific data. The Attorney General's use of his power to issue a CID under the provisions of Virginia's FATA is an inappropriate way to engage with the process of scientific inquiry."
That's all well and good except that Michael Mann and his East Anglia counterpart, Phil Jones have done everything they could do to inhibit any "peer review" of their work to include refusal to share data, blackballing of other scientists whose work disagreed with theirs, bullying scientific journals into toeing the line on their own climate research and theories about global warming, and even destruction of data so it could not be released under FOIA requests.
There has been no legitimate review and interpretation of any of Mann's or Jones' data until just recently, and only because of the climategate email scandal.
I don't care where the grant money came from, it's all taxpayer funds and since it's looking more and more like much of Mann's work was fraudulent and with a political agenda rather than scientific, damn right he should be criminally investigated (and charged if the investigation bears fruit).