Marked Mann
IBD Editorials
Posted 07:07 PM ET
The Weather: A state attorney general is challenging the creator of the global warming hockey stick graph, and the researcher's allies are yelping about intimidation. But who are the real academic bullies?
Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II has requested that the University of Virginia release to his office documents Michael Mann generated in his successful effort to obtain five research grants from the school. Mann, now at Penn State, reportedly received nearly $500,000 in taxpayer-funded grants from the university for research from 1999 to 2005.
Mann first published his hockey-stick chart, in which he shows global temperatures moving sideways for centuries, then growing sharply warmer in the 20th century, 12 years ago.
The graph was used in the United Nations' 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that supposedly confirmed the conjecture that man's activity is warming the planet.
While the environmentalist left worships the Mann chart, its integrity has been called into question twice in the past six years.
In 2004, Canadian researchers Ross McKitrick and Stephen McIntyre found that the chart was based on flawed and biased data-crunching that distorted the temperature record. At that time, physics professor Richard Muller wrote in the MIT Technology Review that the pair "uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick."
Mann's work was further questioned last year when an exchange of e-mails made public indicated that Mann had used a "trick" to conceal late 20th century temperature data that would have undermined the man-made global warming claim.
Cuccinelli is fully within his authority, both moral and legal, to demand that the university turn over the Mann documents. If Mann used public money to commit academic fraud in order to promote a political agenda, he needs to be held accountable.
This is no witch hunt, but the truth isn't getting in the way of hyperbole. Mann says Cuccinelli is trying to smear him. Rachel Levinson, senior counsel with the American Association of University Professors, told the Washington Post that Cuccinelli's request had "echoes of McCarthyism."
"It would be incredibly chilling to anyone else practicing in either the same area or in any politically sensitive area," she said.
In fact, a chill is what scientists who dissent from the global warming orthodoxy have been feeling for a long time. They are intimidated, ridiculed and held in contempt by their scholarly peers. Their grants vanish. Free thought is punished rather than rewarded.
Anyone who thinks Mann is being unfairly treated is ignoring the real bullies.
. |
