Virginia AG Investigating Michael Mann (Mr Hockey Stick) For Fraud

Last week, another sacred cow (a non flatulent one) of the climate change world was taken down a peg, Professor Michael Mann's hockey stick In the same report exonerating the CRU scientists for Climate-gate, the data compiled for the Hockey stick was bashed because the data it used was compiled through inappropriate methods.

This wasn't the first time Mann's most famous work has been revealed to truth deficient, there was the study that showed Mann cherry-picked the trees that he used in for the study, they cherry-picked the weather stations to use in Russia, and the revelation that even the home of Climategate, the CRU, didn't want to use the hockey stick because they suspected that it was bogus.

It looks like Mann may be getting rewarded for his hard work deceiving the public, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is investing the Penn State professor for fraud. Much of Mann's work on the hockey stick was completed when he was working at the University of Virginia. Helping to fund Mann's work was almost a half of a million dollars of grants from the State of Virginia. Cuccinelli is investigating Mann under the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, a 2002 law designed to keep government workers honest.

According to the a local Virginia paper, the Hook, on April 23 the AG asked the university to turn over a truckload of documents related to the climate research funded by the grants (Mann was at UVA between 1999 and 2005).

If Cuccinelli succeeds in finding a smoking gun like the purloined emails that led to the international scandal dubbed Climategate, Cuccinelli could seek the return of all the research money, legal fees, and trebled damages.

“Since it’s public money, there’s enough controversy to look in to the possible manipulation of data,” says Dr. Charles Battig, president of the nonprofit Piedmont Chapter Virginia Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment, a group that doubts the underpinnings of climate change theory.

....Among the documents Cuccinelli demands are any and all emailed or written correspondence between or relating to Mann and more than 40 climate scientists, documents supporting any of five applications for the $484,875 in grants, and evidence of any documents that no longer exist along with proof of why, when, and how they were destroyed or disappeared.

Cuccinelli  has only been in office for four months, but in that short time has directed public universities to remove sexual orientation from their anti-discrimination policies, attacked the Environmental Protection Agency, filed a lawsuit challenging federal health care reform, and now the investigation of Mann.There is nothing like a young Attorney General looking to make a name for himself, to get to the bottom of an international scandal.  Lets hope he exposes the hoax that threatens to destroy our economy.