Horner: Virginia’s Cavalier Ethics: ‘Mann used…hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars building on his work and the name he had created for himself with the Hockey Stick’

Special to Climate Depot

Virginia’s Cavalier Ethics

By Chris Horner

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cucinelli is a smart, aggressive conservative who scares the heck out of the Left, which includes the establishment media. And former University of Virginia tree-ring expert Michael Mann is a darling of the same crowd.

This ensured a combustible mix when, exercising his authority (and, I suggest, responsibility) under the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, Cucinelli sought records from the University of Virginia which were produced during Mann’s days there. It was from this perch that Mann developed the infamous and now disgraced “hockey stick.” The Hockey Stick portrayed for the first time a stable climate until the horrors of Industrial Man. Then temperatures began an unprecedented spike. Or so we were told. Often and loudly.

Mann’s algorithm rewrote history so that it was no longer as those who lived it had chronicled in diaries, agricultural records and cultural artifacts. That politically expedient abandonment of a thousand years of accumulated knowledge was just too good to receive a skeptical reception. It was instead hailed as the “smoking gun” of the IPCC Third Assessment Report – in a chapter which, by chance, Mann was lead author – and proof of man-made global warming.

Upon scrutiny by the Wegman Committee, this proved to be no more than Mann-made warming. Mann’s house of cards began to collapse, but not before he had parlayed it into a research unit at Penn State. Along the way Mann used University of Virginia resources and otherwise hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars building on his work and the name he had created for himself with the Hockey Stick.

Then late last year ClimateGate exposed the climate industry, through 1,000 emails, computer code and code annotations showing how scientists collaborated to subvert the peer-review process, distort research, and violate transparency laws. The focus of much of this subterfuge was protecting Mann’s work from challenge.

ClimateGate placed a billowing cloud of smoke in the public domain suggesting that Mann operated in violation of the Virginia taxpayer-protection statute. Cucinelli is looking to see if there is fire. The Left is furious. I suggest they know what he will find.

Now, suddenly, the University of Virginia, Michael Mann, the Washington Post and others among the politically attuned Left are up in arms about this law over which, incidentally, they were silent in the past. Their