Virginia's Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and Climate Denialists Rebuffed by EPA

"In Western Europe, Moscow has operated by making lucrative arrangements with foreign energy companies that become de facto lobbyists for the Kremlin within their own countries."---"Why The Russia Spy Story Really Matters" (RFE/RL, 7-9-10)

This is a press release from the University of East Anglia in the U.K. Their Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was hacked by criminals and a selection of CRU e-mails were posted on the Internet during November 2009. People who should uphold the law, such as Virginia's despicable Attorney General Cuccinelli, cited these stolen e-mails out of context in a campaign of kompromat against scientists who study global warming. In his suit against the EPA, Cuccinelli even uses the RIA Novosti English-language version of a newspaper article originally published in the Russian business daily Kommersant as "evidence" that British scientists are faking their science.

RIA Novosti is the official press agency of the Russian government. The Kremlin-friendly Kommersant is owned by the billionaire Alisher Usmanov, a Gazprom operative. Cuccinelli's father is a career gas lobbyist whose company boasts of "European" clients. I wonder if these clients might be Russian gas companies or their fronts, but Cuccinelli is not telling who these clients are. Perhaps Cuccinelli's financial motives should be investigated, not Dr. Michael Mann's, because Cuccinelli's father's company gave 96,000 dollars to the Attorney General's campaign. The American people should know if this campaign money is really some payment for attacking Dr. Mann and climate science.

US Environmental Protection Agency dismisses allegations against CRU

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has examined every one of the hacked CRU emails and has strongly affirmed that it finds nothing more than "candid discussion of scientists working through issues that arise in compiling and presenting large complex data sets".

On 29 July 2010, the EPA denied 10 petitions which challenged the Agency’s 2009 determination that climate change is real, is occurring due to emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities, and threatens human health and the environment.

The petitions claimed that climate science could not be trusted, citing the CRU emails and asserting a conspiracy that they said invalidated the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the US National Academy of Sciences, and the US Global Change Research Program.

After months of serious consideration of the petitions and of the state of climate change science, the EPA has found no evidence to support these claims. In contrast, it says its review shows that climate science is credible, compelling, and growing stronger.

The agency reviewed all of the stolen CRU emails, concluding:

… petitioners have routinely misunderstood or mischaracterised the scientific issues, drawn faulty scientific conclusions, resorted to hyperbole, impugned the ethics of climate scientists in general, characterised actions as “falsifications” and “manipulation” with no basis for support, and placed an inordinate reliance on blogs, news stories, and literature that is often neither peer reviewed nor accurately summarized in their petitions. Petitioners often “cherry-pick” language that creates the suggestion or appearance of impropriety, without looking deeper into the issues or providing corroborating evidence that improper action actually occurred.

The agency makes clear that:

Petitioners’ assumptions and subjective assertions regarding what the e-mails purport to show about the state of climate change science are clearly inadequate pieces of evidence to challenge the voluminous and well documented body of science that is the technical foundation of the Administrator’s Endangerment Finding.

(from: http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/endangerment/petitions.html)

Professor Trevor Davies, Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, said: “This is a thorough and forensic investigation which puts the allegations clearly into context and is a welcome addition to the growing body of independent reports which have exonerated our researchers of any wrongdoing in their science.”

Links:

Full information on EPA’s findings and the petitions

EPA Press release

EPA Myths versus Facts

Fact sheet

Extracts from the EPA documents specifically about CRU