The Virginian-Pilot
©
RICHMOND
In a recent court action, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli insists he has a right to climate change research records he's demanded from University of Virginia officials, who have asked a court to allow them to withhold the documents.
"Neither academic freedom nor the First Amendment have ever been held to immunize a person, whether an academic or not, from civil or criminal actions for fraud, let alone immunized them from an otherwise authorized investigation," Cuccinelli's filing with the Albemarle County Circuit Court states.
This spring, the attorney general subpoenaed UVa for records connected to five research grants involving former faculty member Michael Mann, saying they are essential to a state investigation into possible fraud.
School officials initially indicated they would comply with Cuccinelli's request. After an outcry about the case's threat to academic freedom, they reversed course last month and asked a judge to excuse the university from responding.
The school claims that Cuccinelli's fraud investigation has a tenuous connection to the records he seeks. Therefore, the filing says, a probe of a "university researcher's methodology, results, and conclusions" exceeds the authority of his office.
Mann, who worked at UVa from 1999-2005, is among the scientists involved in the recent Climategate controversy involving an Internet leak of e-mails and other documents which doubters of global warming claim show evidence of doctored data.
Now on the faculty at Pennsylvania State University, Mann has noted that subsequent investigations, including at least one by the British government, have cleared him of wrongdoing. He has labeled efforts to invalidate his work "distractions to fool the public, rather than confront the reality of human-caused climate change."
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Arguing the details, missing the significance
The Global Climate Model on which IPCC predictions of future temperatures is based is an unrestrained positive feedback loop. That means that as it gets warmer, things happen, like greater evaporation, melting of permafrost releasing methane, warming soils releasing CO2, and so on, which would warm us further. The warmer it gets, the more warming we get.
Positive feedback loops unrestrained by balancing negative feedbacks are very rare in nature, simply because once you get into one, there is no coming back.
So, if it EVER got warm enough, long enough, to invoke these positive feedbacks, we would already have permanent global warming. Yet we know that within recorded history, it has done so twice, the Roman and Medieval Warm periods, followed by the cooler Dark Ages and Little Ice Age. If they happened, the Global Climate Model is invalid. Mann's 'research' was an attempt to explain away those fluctuations as local events. If his data was manipulated, we are acting on an invalid model.
Past climate cycles did not
have billions and billions of human beings turning sequestered carbon into CO2 in the atmosphere. Yes, there are mechanisms that will keep the earth from getting as hot as Venus but these mechanisms will mean disaster for mankind.
Still missing the point
Every atom of that carbon in fossil fuels has already been in the atmosphere. It got sequestered by plants using CO2.
But what is really important is that if we burned ALL the existing fossil fuels, it would not raise the temperatures as much as the IPCC predicts without the magnifier of that positive feedback loop. CO2 just doesn't have the potential to do it alone.
However, if that loop in the IPCC Global Climate Model is correct, we would never have recovered from the Roman or Medieval warm periods. If they occurred, the IPCC GCM is invalid.
The only honest answer a scientist can give at this point is that we really don't know what counterbalances that positive feedback loop, but it none-the-less exists and limits peak temperatures to only a few degrees above current temperatures, because every time it gets there, we get a centuries long cooling.
Carbon got sequestered
and buried deep underground in oil and coal over hundreds of millions of years. We are digging it up and spewing it back in a couple of centuries. That is very different from past climate cycles. The few degrees of increase that you pooh pooh is EXTREMELY significant. The earth will survive but will billions of people be exterminated before something (like more snow reflecting sunlight) kicks in to reverse it. And will it ever be reversed if we keep nudging it along with more CO2 and methane? The overwhelming consensus of climate scientists is that climate change is very real, very rapid and that human activity is a significant contributor. We ought to quit trying to argue the scientific facts and focus on the appropriate policy response - if any.
America has been doing far more...
...than any other country in the world. Look at China as they are becoming more industrialized as a bigger problem with green house gasses than America. We've been doing our part for 30+ years with higher CAFE standards, CO2 emissions standards, CFC regulations and so on and so forth. At least you said we are contributors and not the only cause/source of green house gas emissions. This is about a man who may have manipulated data in order to obtain grants for UVA at the taxpayers expense. If the "...overwhelming consensus of climate scientists" agree then why do we need to keep spending money to fund them and their research? It is in their own best interest to keep the money pouring in that's why.
Your conspiracy theory
that climate scientists are falsifying their findings to keep research money flowing is, frankly, beyond absurd. The environment we depend on may be and probably is dying and you not only don't support doing anything about it - if we can - you also oppose funding of the research needed to better understand the process? I know rightwingers are all about what is good for themselves in the here and now but this is more than a little extreme in its degree of shortsightedness and selfishness.
You only wish it were that simple...
I said quoting you "...overwhelming consensus of climate scientists". If it is overwhelming and in their minds truly happening why do they need more money to keep studying something that is in their minds already proven? Even you admit you don't know what policy there should be. So please explain in detail what you liberal tree hugging Marxist leaning Uber "Mother Earth" loving Uhbama sycophants have been doing the past 30+ years that helped? In the 70's it was a new ice age, then it was global warming... now it is climate change. MAKE UP YOUR MINDS! The "carbon credits" your side espouses where does that money go? Your messiah Gore has a 20 room mansion in TN, a $9 million home in CA can you say hypocrite?
should have donated
The professor should have donated $55,000 to Cucc's coffers.
Keep at it Ken!
Fraud is fraud no matter what the topic. Especially this rubbish of global warming. Time to get off the green weenie kool-aid.
Clarinda
And all this time, I thought he was elected as the attorney general, not the science general.