Virginia AG Probing Michael Mann For Fraud 617
eldavojohn writes "Republican Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has requested receipts and research documents relating to nearly half a million dollars in state taxpayer money used to conduct climate change research at the University of Virginia while under direction of Michael Mann, originator of the famous 2001 IPCC Hockey Stick graph depicting rapid climate change. Mann appears to be a prime target for Cuccinelli — who has also requested hearings with the EPA to contest the grounds of their carbon dioxide studies. Mann's expenditures of taxpayer money may become problematic if Cuccinelli finds violations of Virginia's Fraud Against Taxpayers Act. Cuccinelli has been active in pushing conservative views in the past, including an effort to remove the titillating mammary from the beloved Great Seal of Virginia. No end in sight for the politicizing of the science and research surrounding climate change."
Not the only conservative views he's pushed (Score:3, Informative)
He's also the asshole that told all the public universities in Virginia they could no longer have policies of non-discrimination towards gays.
Stay classy.
One of many shenanigans (Score:5, Informative)
This is but one of many shenanigans [washingtonmonthly.com] the new Virginia AG is involved in.
sPh
Re:Not the only conservative views he's pushed (Score:4, Informative)
Being gay is probably genetic.There's physical differences in the brains of gays. There are gay animals. You can't choose to be gay or not, same as you can choose who you fall in love with. What gays can do is not act on their desires, sames as religious heterosexuals can choose not to have sex outside of marriage OR not for procreation AND not divorce when they change their minds.. and they do that sooo well !
His Official Policy on Homosexuality Is No Secret (Score:3, Informative)
He's also the asshole that told all the public universities in Virginia they could no longer have policies of non-discrimination towards gays.
Stay classy.
Well, I live in Northern Virginia by DC so I'm painfully aware of his policies. In 2004, as a State Senator in Virginia's Senate, he stated "Homosexuality is wrong [pqarchiver.com]." This was in regards to a bill that would be introduced to add homosexuality under hate crime legislation after a particularly disturbing case. Cuccinelli vowed to fight any extension of gay rights. He would be reelected in 2007 and appointed as Attorney General this year.
Your fancy logic is no use here, this is politics. You have to disprove Cuccinelli's belief that "homosexuality is wrong" and his apparent reinforcement that it moves him up the voting chain so the populace agrees. Good luck, I sometimes have to interact with these people and often just sidestep any conversation in regards to gay rights (trust me, it's not worth it).
It doesn't end at gay rights either [wikipedia.org].
Great Seal of Virginia (Score:3, Informative)
The motto on the Great Seal of Virginia is "Sic Semper Tyrannis". It means "thus always to yyrants" and was attributed to Brutus after stabbing Caesar and was also what John Wilkes Booth said after murdering Lincoln. Timothy McVeigh was wearing the motto (with a picture of Lincoln, not the VA seal) when we was arrested.
That (now) hateful phrase remains on the seal, but at least the cartoon titty is gone.
Re:It is very serious (Score:5, Informative)
Just one quick point: you made up most of that yourself. The others, like the myth of "scientists 30 years ago" predicting another ice age, is pretty heavily debunked, and if you were interested in the truth at all, you'd know it.
Re:Ken Cuccinelli (Score:5, Informative)
Well, for what it's worth, Michael Mann and a few others contribute regularly to the arguably political website known as Real Climate [realclimate.org], a website which isn't exactly known to allow dissenting views.
By their own words, the site was organized to provide immediate spin/response (you pick) to media stories on the subject of AGW... much like any other environmental organization does for topics that relate to their own specific causes... organizations that most folks do not hesitate to label as political in nature.
Re:Another Carpetbagger (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, and he apparently doesn't like our state seal [washingtonmonthly.com], either.
Re:Not the only conservative views he's pushed (Score:5, Informative)
Have you actually read the opinion? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/Cuccinelli.pdf
He's telling the public universities that, in his opinion, they don't have the authority to have those sorts of policies unless specifically authorized by the General Assembly. Previous AGs have said the same thing. Part of his job is to provide legal advice, which is exactly what he did.
Re:Politicizing science? (Score:1, Informative)
No, it means the amount warming was low enough to possibly be explained by natural causes, by chance. We know that significant warming did occur. Again, we would expect to see no statistically significant warming every so often. At a 95% confidence interval, we would expect it 1 out of 20 times. For this same reason, 1 in 20 scientific papers reaches the wrong conclusion, because what you would expect to happen due to chance sometimes doesn't happen, or conversely, what you would expect to happen doesn't happen due to chance.
The bottom line is that you cannot do statistics on a sample of one. This is why repeatability of experiments is so important in science. If we continue to see periods of no statistically significant warming, then you've got something interesting and not just a chance event.
Re:Non-peer Review (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Politicizing science? (Score:1, Informative)
I remember a bit more. The expert correctly calculated that the least squares fit to the specified interval had a positive slope, but enough variance that it was only significant at like a 94% confidence level, so it didn't quite meet a 95% confidence level. (To reach that you would have to include *gasp* 11 years, or start a 10 year interval one year earlier or later). Of course, that's statistical significance rather than "importance" - it's perfectly possible to have not quite statistically significant evidence (like, 18.5:1 odds of something being true rather than the usual 19:1) of something important (trajectory of a killer asteroids or whatever), or overwhelming evidence of something trivial (you are reading a post from some AC!)
Re:It is very serious (Score:5, Informative)
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1 [ametsoc.org]
Re:Not the only conservative views he's pushed (Score:5, Informative)
This means that things in people's lives - choices they made or things that happened to them and how they reacted to those things - are mainly responsible for homosexuality. Biology plays a role, just as it does in just about everything, but it is not the main "cause" (if we want to use that word) of homosexuality.
If anyone wants citations, I can look them up. Just respond to this post and I'll get back to you.
Re:Not the only conservative views he's pushed (Score:5, Informative)
The opinion is remarkably poor legal advice, as it fails to account for the relevant differences between local governments and universities and does not speak to the general grants of authority given to Virginia universities to craft their own rules.
Re:It's 2010! (Score:2, Informative)
Fusion is awfully damn hard. The easiest proposals depend on a magnetic bottle we don't know how to build surrounded by perfect shielding that we don't know how to make (it has to capture nearly every neutron released by the fusion reaction and use it to convert lithium into tritium; you can make the tritium in a fission reactor, but getting enough of it that way would cost about $100 million a week at today's prices. Once you have the tritium, you have to make sure you use damn near all of it, and hydrogen has a fun habit of leaking.).
Laser pinches offer a different path to fusion, but they also need a lot of fuel, about 90,000 pellets a day. Current facilities make about 6 pellets a year, at a cost of $1 million per.
Lest you think I am just some crank making stuff up, this is from a Scientific American article published in March (sorry about the paywall):
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fusions-false-dawn [scientificamerican.com]
And those are just the fuel problems.
That doesn't mean it is impossible, but we aren't anywhere close, even though we are close to technical breakeven (where a reaction releases more energy than was used to initiate it).
Re:It is very serious (Score:5, Informative)
Of course the earth eventually will have another ice age. Those tend to come up now and then. Anthropogenic global cooling due to aerosols is something entirely different, and that's the subject here.
Re:It is very serious (Score:3, Informative)
There was an article in Time magazine about it 40 years ago.
If there were not a several hundred papers in peer reviewed ISI journals proving (or even raising the possibility) that an ice age was on the doorstep, then it can hardly be said that anything approaching the current consensus on warming existed, can it? Can you cite several hundred? Can you cite one hundred? How about a dozen? Half a dozen ...
No you can't! And you can't because the notion that any consensus existed in the 70s (or 80s) among expert scientists that an ice age was imminent is a myth. Or, to call a spade a spade, it's a lie.
Now it's true that some scientists mused about the possibility (after all 3 were quoted in the Newsweek article). And you know one the bases for their concern? It was the that relative to the emerging paleo record, the C20th showed unusually pronounced warming. It looked like we were a the peak of a cycle! Now, of course, we know exactly why that warming had taken place.
So how can you say it was a myth?
Easy. There was an article in Time magazine (or Newsweek) about it! :P
Re:It is very serious (Score:5, Informative)
The thing is, it was settled science by the 70s, so it's not surprising that you wouldn't find many articles about the topic.
In that case why does the disinformation machine sprout the line about scientists arguing for an imminent ice age in the 70s, rather than say the 40s? If they were then surely there should be some literature. The clear implication being made is that a majority of experts in the 70s believed an ice age was approaching (quickly). The facts, as you cited them 7 papers predicting cooling, 44 warming give the lie to that.
Secondly, while Milankovitch obviously did his work earlier (he died in 1958), it is far from true that even the periodic nature of glacials, and how those periods are determined, was "settled science" by the 70s. The work on ice ages was very alive in the 70s (you'll find more than 7 papers which don't predict an "immient" ice age) and certainly not settled until after the publication of this paper [sciencemag.org] in 1976.
Re:Fraud? It's looking him in the mirror (Score:5, Informative)
Mann did invite a lot of criticism by not opening his data when people asked him for it. I'm referring of course to the issues with the bristlecone pine and his convolution of several sets of temperature proxies. I haven't heard of any evidence that Mann is involved in any fraud though, but witch hunts by their very nature never come up empty-handed. This one won't either.
I think you're confusing Michael E. Mann [wikipedia.org], who conducted some research based on climate data with the CRU [wikipedia.org] which actually publishes some of the data.
The controversy in that case was just this: CRU publishes a compilation of recent near-surface temperature, in association with the Hadley Centre. This is made up of data from various national meteorological agencies, which is processed to remove local noise and variations (urban heat island effect, moving of weather stations, etc), gridded and used to produce global surface temperature records.
The end-product of CRU's record was always available in public. What was controversial was that some of the national weather agencies' records couldn't be released because those agencies had copyright over the data, and were selling it commercially. There's also a possibility that the CRU scientists used copyright as an excuse to spite those who were using FOIA requests to harass them (as they saw it, and I for one don't blame them - requesting data you have no intention of using, for the sole purpose of making a noise about it, whether it's released or not is disingenuous at best).
In any case, pretty much all of the actual data, barring a few stations, was in the public domain long before the FOIA requests - those making the requests just couldn't get as much political mileage out of public domain data. You can still find all that data by going to RealClimate [realclimate.org]
Michael Mann, on the other hand, is a researcher who worked on the "hockey stick" graph - a consolidation of various paleoclimate data, collected from proxies like tree rings and ice cores. He and his co-authors overlaid several paleoclimate reconstructions over each other, to show how well they correlated, and found that they all correlated pretty well, and showed a marked rise in temperature during the industrial era. One controversy with this data is that they added instrument records (that is, the CRU temperature series) to the end of the chart [wikipedia.org] (which you can see as the black line in the image), which shows more warming in recent times. Another is that one proxy (tree ring data) shows a decline in the proxy measurement (tree ring width) from the 1960s onwards, which on the face of it, should imply that temperatures are declining, but which no other data, including all the various instrument data show. Mann used a statistical trick of stopping the tree ring data with the 60s and tacking on the instrument data, a technique some people disagree with.
Anyway, the point is, none of Michael Mann's data was ever hidden away
Re:Not the only conservative views he's pushed (Score:3, Informative)
One theory I've heard thrown around is that the trait exists in some small percentage of people, but is only triggered by an outside factor sometimes, possibly population density. As density rises, the probability of the homosexual individual finding another homosexual individual rises sharply. If the density is insufficient, they reproduce as normal and the gene carries on. I suspect that the advent of Judaism, Christianity, and other monogamous anti-homosexual religions may have affected this in recent times.
As an aside, a trait doesn't have to be beneficial to stay in the gene pool, it just has to not be (sufficiently) harmful.
Re:His Official Policy on Homosexuality Is No Secr (Score:5, Informative)
Well, yes, that is flamebait. Global warming was politicized long before Al Gore came along - however his success pushed it into the area of public conversation, and then it because more recognizable to a lot of people.
While I don't claim this piece is unbiased, it is _very_ informative on the politics behind global warming campaigning. It's also quite a few years old and possibly out of date, but certainly enlightening nonetheless. I recommend you have a look.
http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/denialmachine/index.html [www.cbc.ca]
Now back to our regular topic, which has nothing at all to do with any of this post...
Re:I was going to mod you down, but... (Score:3, Informative)
State AGs do this on a regular basis. If they see something that they believe could become contentious, whether it be a law or a court ruling, they'll often issue a legal opinion to provide guidance on how to implement the matter before being formally asked to do so in order to minimize any delay. California's AGs, both Democrat and Republican, have been doing it for as long as I can remember and I've heard of numerous other states' AGs that have done similar things.
Re:Not the only conservative views he's pushed (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, let's see your citations. The fact that 50% of studies find a significant genetic factor and 50% do not says nothing about their validity. The references to psychology in your signature and alias do not inspire confidence. The field of psychology in general has a pretty atrocious record in addressing the subject of homosexuality scientifically. And I wouldn't expect most psychological studies to have much insight on anything related to genetics.
Moreover, there is evidence that homosexuality may not be genetic, but still not a choice as you suggest. Research indicates that hormones or chemicals in the mother's womb play a significant role in determining sexuality and among men born to mothers who already have had boy (i.e. men with older brothers), there is a greater incidence of homosexuality. This comes up off the top of google: http://www.seattlepi.com/national/275425_gay27.html [seattlepi.com] In short, I would give much greater weight to more recent neuroscientific studies than most strictly psychological studies.
Finally, talk with almost any man who is openly gay (emphasis on openly) and he'll convincingly disabuse you of the notion that it's "choices they made".
For a fascinating account of the tumultuous history of homosexuality and the DSM (a textbook case of the politicization of science for both bad and good), I highly recommend this This American Life broadcast:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/204/81-Words [thisamericanlife.org]
Re:His Official Policy on Homosexuality Is No Secr (Score:3, Informative)
The vast majority of that overpopulation is in poor areas of the world where the CO2 output is fairly low, the western nations that produce all that pollution have very low growth or even declining populations.
Re:Parliamentary privilege? (Score:3, Informative)
Does the US have a concept of parliamentary privilege?
Is said republican willing to details his accusations of fraud outside of a legislative chamber?
What's the test for defamation in Virginia? Accusing someone's lifelong work of fraud in front of the world's media could potentially be libelous (IANAL).
I think you missed out on what the AG is. It is the duty of the Attorney General to investigate fraud and missuse of public money. Is this a witch hunt? Probably, but that doesn't mean he worng to investigate the claim of fraud.
Re:Not the only conservative views he's pushed (Score:2, Informative)
Bullshit. That's the same tired tripe they've been pushing since well before the civil rights movement. You can't discriminate against blacks and you can't discriminate against gays. Get used to it.
Actually, in a democracy you can discriminate against whoever the hell you want as long as the majority agrees with you. Get used to it.
Which is why the United States is not a Democracy, nor has it ever been.
The United States is a Representative Constitutional Republic, and always has been.
I think the reason for the Founder's decision on this form of Government couldn't be clearer, just look at the country today.
You've got an overwhelming majority...who believe utter nonsense.
When you think about it, our system is really only one of two that could contain itself long enough to achieve so-called "Superpower Status". The other (apparently, looking at history) was Communism (speaking of the former Soviet Union).
However, seeing as the United States is still here and still retains it's Superpower status, I believe we've proven that only the mixture of Democracy and Authoritarianism that is the "Representative Republic" form of Government can withstand the long haul of time.
Re:His Official Policy on Homosexuality Is No Secr (Score:4, Informative)
It's been interesting to hear the narrative pushed at you from the wingnuts, you mean? Because the first notable paper on global warming, by Plass in 1956, was called “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change”.
But apropos spin...
Who wrote that? Republican strategist for the Bush administration, Frank Luntz [wikipedia.org], in 2002.
Re:His Official Policy on Homosexuality Is No Secr (Score:4, Informative)
it has been interesting to watch the spin doctors morph AGW into what I think is a more likely and accurate way to put it - "climate change". Something Earth has experienced for its entire existence.
"Global warming" is an accurate term - it was meant to refer to the global mean temperature increasing. The problem was that many non-scientists don't understand how mean values are calculated, and hence didn't understand that the mean could increase even though some regions might cool. The myth that Any Cooling Disproves Global Warming [newscientist.com] became widespread, and so scientists began to talk about "climate change" instead.
Re:Not the only conservative views he's pushed (Score:3, Informative)
general grants of authority given to Virginia universities to craft their own rules.
Which cannot differ from the rules set out by the General Assembly. This is the primary difference between Virginia and many other states (PA, KY, and MA excepted), in that localities, or in this case Commonwealth-owned corporations, have no legal power other that what's granted them by the GA.
It's akin to the USPS giving an okay to interstate shipments of medical marijuana by mail; they can't just arbitrarily do that without Congressional authorization. Hell, they can't even raise postage rates without Congressional approval.
Re:His Official Policy on Homosexuality Is No Secr (Score:3, Informative)
Re:His Official Policy on Homosexuality Is No Secr (Score:5, Informative)
"It's been interesting to hear the narrative pushed at you from the wingnuts, you mean? Because the first notable paper on global warming, by Plass in 1956, was called “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change”."
Personally, in these cases I refer them to Svante Arrhenius, who had calculated that doubling CO2 level raises temperature by 4-5C. In 1908.
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm [aip.org]
Re:Not the only conservative views he's pushed (Score:3, Informative)
You ask a lawyer for an opinion on the law, he's going to give you a legal opinion, not some tripe based on emotional biases.
Okay, a fair enough statement. The question then would be: Why did a lawyer -- not just any fly-by-night ambulance chaser the bar has yet to catch up with but the Attorney General representing the State of Virginia -- issue a legal opinion on civil rights which did not take into account the 14th fucking Amendment to the U.S. Constitution?
Was his opinion just that half-assed? Did the universities specifically ask him to base his opinion solely on state law and ignore the U.S. Constitution? Is it conceivable that he was simply unaware of the 14th Amendment and the impact it had on the States? I understand that the Virginia AG is elected; did the people of Virginia select a lawyer so incompetent that it took the Governor -- who unlike the A.G. is not explicitly in a lawyering position -- to step in and point out the obvious?
Or could it be that his oft-stated belief that homosexuality is wrong and should not be protected affected his opinion, such that he deliberately chose to frame his argument in a Constitution-less context so he could claim that anti-discrimination policies were not legal?
I'm just asking, because despite asking a lawyer his opinion on the law, it sure seems like "tripe based on emotional biases" is what the Universities got.