Talking and Litigating About Climate Science
A Discover Magazine Blog, “The Intersection,” is advising climate scientists how to communicate about climate science. The posts include suggestions on how to communicate on politicized issues while avoiding the appearance of advocacy, how the discussion of climate science should be framed (and for, and by, whom), and whether and how climate science should be simplified to be more media-friendly.
These posts make for interesting reading in conjunction with the Civil Investigative Demand (CID) reissued by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli seeking the work papers of former University of Virginia (now Penn State) climate scientist Michael Mann. You may recall that Mann was investigated “for allegations of research impropriety that surfaced last year” after hacked emails obtained from servers at University of East Anglia in England were published online. While Mann was cleared of impropriety by Penn State in June, Attorney General Cuccinelli alleges that the CID is necessary to investigate whether Virginia state grant money was obtained through fraudulent means while Mann was at University of Virginia. The new 28-page demand was served roughly a month after Virginia Judge Paul Peatross (Sixteenth Judicial Court) granted the University’s petition to set aside the earlier CIDs issued by Attorney General Cuccinelli covering the same subject matter.
In his ruling on the original CIDs, Judge Peatross wrote that he understood “the controversy regarding Dr. Mann’s work on the issue of global warming,” but it was “not clear what he did that was misleading, false or fraudulent in obtaining funds from the Commonwealth of Virginia.”
In the new CID, the Attorney General appears to rely on an alleged “lack of rigor” in academic research as the basis for the fraud-based CID:
The nature of the conduct constituting the alleged violation of the false claims law is that, based on claims made in Dr. Mann’s CV, he participated in the application for and claims for payment under the grant listed below. Upon information and belief, the grant application references Dr. Mann’s prior work, including two papers, “Global-scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing over the Past Sex Centuries” and “Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties and Limitations,” which have come under significant criticism . . . and which Dr. Mann knew or should have known contained false information, unsubstantiated claims and/or were otherwise misleading. Specifically . . . some of the conclusions of the papers demonstrate a complete lack of rigor regarding the statistical analysis of the alleged data, meaning that that result reported lacked statistical significance without a specific statement to that effect.
The Rectors and Visitors of the University of Virginia – citing the need to protect academic freedom – have vowed to fight the new CIDs.
What does this all mean for climate regulation and litigation? Cuccinelli (and others) have used claims of flaws in climate science as a basis to challenge EPA’s endangerment finding. And, if any proceed to the merits, pending tort-based climate cases raises interesting questions of the intersection of climate science and causation.
