I was born and raised in Virginia. Most of my immediate family still lives there. That’s why, I suppose, it doesn’t surprise me that Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is pushing the ridiculous CRU e-mail controversy by once again singling out Michael Mann for investigation. The Charlottesville Hook reports that:
In papers sent to UVA April 23, Cuccinelli’s office commands the university to produce a sweeping swath of documents relating to Mann’s receipt of nearly half a million dollars in state grant-funded climate research conducted while Mann— now director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State— was at UVA between 1999 and 2005.
And who might Cuccinelli be interested in? Taking his lead from Coby Beck, Deltoid has the scoop:
Cuccinelli isn’t just asking for documents relating to his research grants but all correspondence Mann had with Caspar Ammann, Raymond Bradley, Keith Briffa, John Christy, Edward Cook, Thomas Crowley, Roseanne D’Arrigo, Valerie Masson-Delmotte, David Douglass, Jan Esper, Melissa Free, Chris de Freitas, Vincent Grey [sic], James Hack, Malcolm Hughes, Eystein Jansen, Phil Jones, Thomas Karl, Otto Kinne, A.T.J de Laat, Murari Lal, Stephen Mackwell, Glenn McGregor, Stephen McIntyre, Ross McKitrick, Patrick Michaels, Jonathan Overpeck, Tim Osborn, Roger Pielke Jr, Benjamin Santer, Gavin Schmidt, Stephen Schneider, Olga Solomina, Susan Solomon, Kevin Trenberth, Eugene Wahl, Edward Wegman, Thomas Wigley, Vincent Gray [again!] and all RAs, secretaries, and administrative staff at the University of Virginia. As well as all correspondence that references anyone in the list above.
Wowzers. That’s a lot of co-conspirators. The reliable rabbit picks up the thread, pinning the tail on Professor Curry.
I did get a little kick out of Prof. Singer’s e-mail, reposted by Eli:
There is a good chance that Virginia’s Attorney-General Ken Cuccinelli will come up with the “smoking gun” — where other socalled investigations have only produced one whitewash after another.
We know from the leaked e-mails of Climategate that Prof.Michael Mann was involved in the international conspiracy to “hide the decline” [in global temperatures], using what chief conspirator Dr.Phil Jones refers to as “Mike [Mann]’s trick.” Now at last we may find out just how this was done.
There’s a substantial amount of cognitive dissonance in those two paragraphs. Let’s see: so in the first paragraph, there’s a tacit admission that we have no smoking gun, and that the investigations haven’t really turned up much other than whitewash; but lo, in the second paragraph, there’s a relatively bold assertion that the very same Climategate e-mails mentioned in the paragraph immediately above have given us all the knowledge we need to connect the dots and conclude that Michael Mann was involved in an “international conspiracy” with “chief conspirator” Dr. Phil Jones. Of course, the controversy will go on. Roger notes that there is zero chance of Mann being found guilty of violating the Fraud Against Taxpayers Statute. This should be fun.
Cruel Mistress 