Attorney General Cuccinelli Under Investigation for Climate Probe—By Greenpeace

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.

“I’ve loved science from the time I was a young child,” the professor at Pennsylvania State University’s Department of Meteorology told SolveClimate in an interview. “I’m driven by a passion to understand Earth’s climate system. One aspect is human-caused climate change. Pursuing that has opened me up to the climate change denial industry.

“For me, the bottom line is that it’s a matter of principle,” he continued, his words now flowing. “To allow climate change deniers to be successful in scaring scientists away from the science of climate change is unconscionable. I’m the last person to want to give them that victory.”

Pause.

Then: “Or at least I like to think that’s the approach I’ve taken.”

Hundreds of his fellow scientists seem to think it is. They rallied around the research Mann contributed to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change when the trumped up “Climategate” affair erupted last winter.

And they have come to his defense again now that Cuccinelli is in the midst of investigating him for violating the state Fraud Against Taxpayers Act. That’s connected to research he conducted while teaching at the University of Virginia between 1999 and 2005.

The environmental advocacy organization Greenpeace US is now doggedly pursuing a tangled paper trail which they hope will expose the inner workings of a well-connected network of naysayers attempting to discredit the work of certain climate scientists and to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from deploying the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases.

“We’ve been fighting off the climate change deniers for a very long time,” Greenpeace research director Kert Davies told SolveClimate. “These attacks distract people from the science of climate change. Part of what we’ve done for 20 years is to fend them off and educate people about climate change.”

Climategate Losing Traction?

On July 1, Penn State completed the second portion of a two-part investigation of Mann’s role in the “Climategate” e-mails. After two months of deliberation, the investigatory committee found him innocent of the remaining charge of scientific misconduct.

The committee found 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.”

Back in February, the Penn State committee also found him innocent of misconduct, finding no evidence that he falsified data, destroyed data related to the 2007 IPPC report or misused privileged or confidential information available to him in his capacity as a scholar.

“Climategate” burst onto the scene last November after hackers released thousands of e-mail exchanges and other climate data exchanged among researchers at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. Mann was embroiled in the controversy because his name appeared in the suspect e-mails.