Articles Tagged "Mann Made Climate Change"

An Albemarle County judge has dismissed Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s demand that the University of Virginia turn over documents related to the research of a prominent climate change expert.

Cuccinelli, a vocal climate change skeptic, had been investigating the possibility that climatology professor Michael Mann fraudulently obtained five taxpayer-funded research grants while employed at UVa between 1999 and 2005. In an opinion issued this morning, Judge Paul M. Peatross Jr. ruled that Cuccinelli failed to show a sufficient “reason to believe” that UVa possessed any documents related to Mann that suggested a fraud occurred.

UVa fought Cuccinelli’s demand for documents, saying the attorney general’s investigation violates the principle of academic freedom and would have a chilling effect on scientific research of controversial subjects. In his ruling, Peatross set aside Cuccinelli’s civil investigative demands “in their entirety, without prejudice to the Commonwealth to proceed according to the law.”

Cuccinelli did not show, Peatross wrote, any evidence that Mann’s work was “misleading, false or fraudulent in obtaining funds from the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

Click source to read FULL report from Brian McNeill

CHARLOTTESVILLE -- A team of lawyers for Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II, a vocal skeptic of global warming, went to court Friday to further his investigation into whether former University of Virginia professor Michael Mann manipulated data to show that there has been a rapid, recent rise in the Earth's temperature.

Lawyers from the attorney general's office said the climate scientist might have engaged in fraud by purposely designing his well-known "hockey-stick" graph to show global warming or including manipulated research on his curriculum vitae, which he submitted for grants.

Deputy Attorney General Wesley G. Russell Jr., who argued the case on Cuccinelli's behalf, said there was a possibility of a "consistent pattern of manipulation of data."

But attorneys for the university say other investigations found no wrongdoing by Mann, who did not attend Friday's hearing.

Cuccinelli issued a civil investigative demand, essentially a subpoena, for documents from U-Va. for five grant applications Mann prepared and all e-mail between Mann and his research assistants, secretaries and 39 other scientists across the country. U-Va. is fighting back, arguing that the demand exceeds Cuccinelli's authority under state law and intrudes on the rights of professors to pursue academic inquiry free from political pressure.

Sticky Wicket ‘ phrase, meaning: “A difficult situation”.

Oh, my. There is a new and important study on temperature proxy reconstructions (McShane and Wyner 2010) submitted into the Annals of Applied Statistics and is listed to be published in the next issue. According to Steve McIntyre, this is one of the “top statistical journals”. This paper is a direct and serious rebuttal to the proxy reconstructions of Mann. It seems watertight on the surface, because instead of trying to attack the proxy data quality issues, they assumed the proxy data was accurate for their purpose, then created a bayesian backcast method. Then, using the proxy data, they demonstrate it fails to reproduce the sharp 20th century uptick.

Now, there’s a new look to the familiar “hockey stick”...before

We recently posted in our "Reply to article" section Global warming alarmists can't stand the heat by Peter J. Havanac, Meteorologist., the following is a reply from Michael E. Mann!!

Here's the context surrounding a flawed 2003 research paper.

By MICHAEL E. MANN

In "Warming alarmists can't stand the heat" (July 26), the Star Tribune allowed Peter J. Havanac to do a grave disservice to its readers by making false statements about me and other climate scientists.

Havanac repeated false allegations (based on illegally hacked e-mails) of supposed scientific misconduct by scientists at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (for example, the supposed destruction of e-mails) that have now been rejected as false by three separate investigations in the U.K. A similar investigation by my university has exonerated me of any of the wrongdoing alleged by climate-change deniers like Havanac. Unfortunately, these exonerations cannot stop individuals like Havanac from repeating the false allegations. Only the possession of decency can do that.

Havanac parroted the false claim that I sought to "undermine" a journal that "contradicted views held by ... global-warming alarmists." His claim was based on a thorough misrepresentation of a single example: a deeply flawed paper published in 2003 by the journal Climate Research. That paper, by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, claimed that recent warming is not unusual.

Last week, the third of three allegedly independent inquiries into last fall’s Climategate scandal at Britain’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) was concluded. Like the other two, it found troubling behaviour by the scientists at the CRU or by the University of East Anglia, of which the CRU is a part — most notably attempts to hide data from critics and from government investigators. Yet in the end, all three conclude no real wrongdoing occurred and that the basic premise of mainstream climate science — that our climate is changing for the worse and human activity is at least partly to blame — remains undamaged by the scandal.

Whew! Thank goodness for that.

The trouble is, while green groups have trumpeted this trio of reports as vindication of their climate alarmism, it would be hard to conclude any of the reports was truly independent. Indeed, in a recent posting on the website of the the Atlantic magazine (hardly a hotbed for climate-change skepticism), the magazine’s senior editor Clive Crook says that at best the three are “mealy-mouthed apologies; at worst they are patently incompetent and even wilfully wrong.”

Geoffrey Boulton, for instance, one of the five panellists on the most recent inquiry into the leaking last November of damaging emails among many of the world’s leading climate scientists, was for 18 years a member of the University of East Anglia’s School of Environmental Sciences, the department in which the CRU is housed. In other words, far from being an independent investigator, he was a former colleague of the scientists involved.

Penn State University just exonerated Professor Michael Mann for wrongdoing related to Climategate. While that good news for Mann is no surprise, it came at a dear cost to Penn State – its integrity.

Soon after Climategate broke last November, Penn State convened an internal committee to investigate Mann, the primary author of the now-infamous and discredited “hockey stick” global warming graph.

Hopes for a bona fide investigation were dashed when the preliminary results were released in February. To the joy of climate alarmists, Penn State announced via press release that Mann was cleared of three of the four allegations against him (regarding falsification/suppression of data, deletion of e-mails/data and misuse of confidential information).  But if one looks past the release and reads the committee’s report, it becomes obvious the fix was in.

The preliminary review included the Climategate e-mails themselves, an interview with Mann, and documents submitted by Mann. While one committee member did informally endeavor to get external views on Mann, they only came from Texas A&M’s Gerald North and Stanford University’s Donald Kennedy.

Climategate, the global warming scandal that won’t be swept away despite the best efforts of international governments, now moves to a Virginia court showdown.

After several Climategate inquiries all dismissed by critics as whitewashes, this is where the real climate war begins, say opponents. Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli has fired his latest legal salvo with a 41-page brief in a Virginia state courtroom.

On Tuesday the Albemarle County Circuit Court was presented with the state prosecutor's case as to why the University of Virginia (UVA) cannot refuse to answer a subpoena to disclose documents pertaining to an alleged $500,000 grant fraud by former employee and climate researcher, Michael Mann.

Lawyers for UVA have countered that Cuccinelli's request violates Mann's academic freedom and that the attorney general has no reasonable basis to believe fraud took place. They've asked a judge to set the demand aside.

Leaked Emails Prove Mann’s Intent

Cuccinelli seeks to establish the culpability of Michael Mann as a funding fraudster. The key issue that must be proven is whether Mann acted consciously to hide the failures in his data, which would be fraud, rather than that Mann is just another incompetent climate data handler, as was determined by three official British investigations into Climategate.

Mann appeared to implicated himself in his leaked Climategate emails, such as that of October 27, 2009 in which he confessed, ”As we all know, this isn't about truth at all, its about plausibly deniable accusations.”

Michael Mann, Penn State professor and climate scientists talks with Susan McGinnis about the investigations that have cleared his name in the "Climategate" scandal. The latest U.K. investigation says Mann's science is good, and the U.N. global warming report is sound.

Dear fellow "contrarians" and "professional deniers" click source to see FULL video and listen to what Michael Mann has to say about the heatwave in the USA and much, much more....."You Could Not Make It Up".

Is his investigation of climatologist Michael Mann an unlawful, unduly burdensome and impermissible intrusion into scientific research?

WASHINGTON—As a scientist, Michael Mann has peered into his share of microscopes, but he never expected to have his life’s work magnified under one.

While delving into math and physics as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley in the late 1980s and then geology and geophysics as a doctoral student at Yale University in the 1990s, he could hardly imagine the firestorm his “hockey stick” diagram would ignite among those who doubt that the burning fossil fuels are significantly altering the Earth’s climate.

That ordeal prepared him for the scrutiny that descended upon him as a result of the manufactured scandal called "Climategate," and for the latest investigation into his science, this time for taxpayer fraud of all things, by Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli.

Smelling a politically motivated witch hunt, Greenpeace has stepped into the fray with its own investigation into the Attorney General and possible relationships with global warming deniers.

This kind of commotion has become all part of a day's work for Mann. Years of harassment and verbal pummeling have not been able to deter the Pennsylvania State University climatologist from persevering in the career he clearly cherishes.

Click source to read FULL report

A Penn State University panel of scientists on Thursday exonerated one of the school's researchers of accusations that his work on climate change violated the university's research misconduct policy.

After a four-month investigation, five university professors unanimously cleared professor Michael Mann, a climate scientist and one of several hundred researchers sharing the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their work with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The Penn State investigators concluded in a report released yesterday that "Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities."

"I am pleased that the last phase of Penn State's investigation has now been concluded, and that it has cleared me of any wrongdoing," Mann wrote in an e-mail. "These latest findings should finally put to rest the baseless allegations against me and my research."

Mann's work was chronicled in the 2006 documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," about former Vice President Al Gore's public campaign on global warming.