Dr.
Michael Mann, who under a lesser title at
University of Virginia created the famed “hockey stick” chart of
20th-century temperature escalations while leveling the Medieval
Warm Period, has enlisted a Climategate Cavalcade of Stars to help
him enter as an interested party in a
lawsuit in which my
organization, American Tradition
Institute, seeks to get his old UVA emails and
data.
Early this month Mann, who is now at Pennsylvania State
University, had his lawyers
ask for permission to intervene in ATI’s
Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against UVA. Our request seeks
correspondence between Mann and 30-plus other global warming
activist scientists who form much of the cabal that created the
various predictive reports of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change.
The university,
buttressed by the urgings of groups
including
ACLU, People for the American Way,
Union of Concerned Scientists, and American
Association of University Professors, is withholding the meaningful
documents ATI seeks. Mann himself said the few thousand documents
UVA turned over so far were, more or less, meaningless
“boilerplate.”
ATI lawyers David Schnare and Chris Horner (also an AmSpec
contributor), under a court-order, will be allowed to identify some
of the remaining emails the university believes should be kept
from public view so as to reduce the number the judge will have to
examine, and then ATI and UVA will argue which ones should be
disclosed in a court hearing this fall. Dr. Schnare and Mr. Horner
are under clear orders that whatever they see they must forever
keep confidential unless the court later orders those emails
released.
In his attempt to intervene, Mann has called upon friends
in academe to bolster his claim that, despite using a
taxpayer-funded email system at UVA, that he has the right to
prevent the public from seeing what he says are “private” emails.
The concept that government-owned, or “public,” does not mean
“private” is inconceivable to him (see Exhibit 2,
here).
His appeal to the Prince William County court where ATI’s
case is being heard included supportive letters (Exhibit 6,
here) to UVA president Teresa Sullivan from
four of his cohorts in Climategate or hockey stick creation fame.
Each pleader registers objection to UVA providing “personal” or
“private” emails to ATI under its existing court-authorized
agreement. And amusingly enough, each of his four backers has his
or her own credibility problems.
The first complainant is Rosanne D’Arrigo, a tree-ring
reconstructor at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, who
told Sullivan in her letter that “these are personal emails not
relevant to valid scientific concerns.” Plucky, D’Arrigo is famous
for
explaining to the National Academy of Sciences
that “cherry picking” is necessary if you want to make cherry
pie. And as for what she thought of
that “divergence problem” with tree-ring
proxies:
Pshaw! (see pages 11 & 12).
Next standing behind Mann is
Dr. Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory, who when last we checked was
still on the outside looking in at the National
Academy of Sciences “Fight Club,” despite his Climategate-revealed
plans to “beat the crap out of” somewhat skeptical fellow
climatologist Pat Michaels. Those sentiments ran afoul of LLNL’s
“missions and values” which required their publicly funded
employees to show “respect for individuals” and “treat each other
with dignity.” He also had
erased statements that stated global warming
was not attributable to human activities from the eighth chapter of
the 1995 UN IPCC report, which also set off the integrity
alarms.
Santer also
fails to give up the idea that his
government-funded email communications belong to taxpayers, not
himself. His letter to UVA’s Sullivan (of course) does not note his
IPCC deletions as he explains the integrity of his and Mann’s
“science,” but it does characterize their emails as “personal.”
“Professor Mann’s only ‘transgression’ is that he has performed
cutting-edge research in the public and national interest
(emphasis mine),” Santer wrote to Sullivan. Yep, that’s “personal”
all right!
The third prestigious scientist (just ask him) supporting
Mann is Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric
Research. His Climategate fame is derived from his concern about a
“travesty” that “we can’t account for the lack of warming at the
moment,” in addition to his other failed predictions such as
future hurricane horrors while administering
discipline as
one of the scientific journal brown shirts.
In
writing to Sullivan, Trenberth makes sure
she knows how “distinguished” and “prominent” he is while he urges
her to hide Mann’s emails from public scrutiny, citing “academic
freedom.” We ask, can there be “taxpayer freedom” to opt out of the
financing of secretive scientists’ research?
The final alarmist to push for Sullivan to keep Mann’s
work under wraps is University of Massachusetts scientist Raymond
Bradley, who
co-authored the “hockey stick”, which should
suffice in explanation of his support for Mann. But just for
amusement it’s also noteworthy that Bradley’s letter to Sullivan
refers her to his new book “Global
Warming and Political Intimidation,” in which he
cites Ben Santer as a victim!
But that’s not all. Bradley, so outraged by intrusion on
to principles of academic secrecy when exercised by ATI, was
unhindered by such sentiments in his own inquiry (with
USA Today reporter Dan Vergano) of
Professor Edward Wegman at George Mason University, another
Virginia state educational institution. Bradley had accused Wegman
of plagiarizing his work (more
meaningless “boilerplate,” according to Climate
Audit, irrelevant to Wegman’s findings) in his 2006 report that
exposed statistical problems with Mann’s work. While George Mason
investigated his allegation, Bradley
violated a confidentiality requirement about
forwarding Wegman’s work to third parties. And as Climate Audit’s
Steve McIntyre has shown, Bradley is selective in who he gets mad
at for plagiarism (friends are
okay), and of course,
self-examination of his own reproduction of others’ work is
non-existent.
In his attempt to intervene in the ATI/UVA case, Mann also
makes his own plea to Sullivan and the university lawyers.
“Allowing the indiscriminate release of these materials will cause
damage to reputations and harm principles of academic freedom,” he
wrote.
Fortunately neither side — ATI nor UVA — believes in an
“indiscriminate” release. But in that one statement Mann provides
reason enough for the records about his work and the company he
keeps to be made public.
