Dr. Michael Mann's Data is Available on the Internet

"My research is all based on data sets regarding the Earth’s climate that are freely and widely available to all researchers.  Whether I make available my computer programs is irrelevant to whether our results can be reproduced...


My computer program is a piece of private, intellectual property, as the National Science Foundation and its lawyers recognize. It is a bedrock principle of American law that the government may not take private property “without [a] public use,” and “without just compensation.”"---Dr. Michael Mann's letter to Congressman Joe Barton (7-15-05)


Mendacious people who spread falsehoods on the Internet about the alleged fabrications of climate scientists often claim that the famous Penn State climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann has kept his data secret. Actually, as Dr. Mann's 2005 letter to Congressman Barton states, Dr. Mann's data is available on Internet at government and university sites. On page 6 of his letter to Congressman Barton, Dr. Mann even provides the link where the computer code used to make his 1998 "hockey stick" graph can be accessed.


Dr. Mann's computer program for his 1998 "hockey stick" graph could have remained a secret because computer codes are private intellectual property; still, researchers can develop their own computer codes and use Mann's data to verify his results. Scholars have replicated Dr. Mann's results by using his data with their own computer programs.


Researchers need not have access to exactly the same computer programs (or “code”) as Dr. Mann developed. Dr. Mann's results can be replicated using his underlying data and methodologies. See the letter (7-15-05) that Dr. Mann sent to the corrupt Congressman Joe Barton explaining the true facts and listing the Internet sites where his data was stored in 2005.


The MBH [Mann-Bradley-Hughes] data have been publicly available for more than a decade now! When Dr. Mann moved from U.Va, the same information and data were maintained through his Penn State research site.


Here are some links where the data can be found:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/#Paleo_data

http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/research/MANNETAL98/


More generally, links to ALL the MBH research data, etc. from ALL of the MBH studies are here:

http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/research/research.html

Dr. Alan Robock Explains Nuclear Winter

Dr. Alan Robock (see his informative articles and power-points) is the head author of an entry on nuclear winter that appears in The Encyclopedia of Earth. I think that Dr. Robock is a much more credible source on information about nuclear winter than the anonymous author of an ignorant, misleading, defamatory FBI white paper that recycles the conspiracy theories of a former KGB official and smears scientists who research the science of nuclear winter.


The disinformation about nuclear winter is being spread by FBI Agent Patrick Laflin on his FBI Tampa CI Strategic Partnership Newsletter (July 1, 2011). See the link marked "Higher Education and National Security." The actual white paper is titled "Higher Education and National Security: The Targeting of Sensitive, Proprietary, and Classified Information on Campuses of Higher Education."


The Russian government has just held a conference titled "Problems of Adaptation to Climate Change." The conference was organized by the Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring (ROSHYDROMET).


Dr. Robock presented a paper at this conference titled "Smoke and Mirrors." Dr. Robock has posted a power point for his students with the same title on his website. On the website, the powerpoint appears on the left side of the screen and is titled Geoengineering Powerpoint (revised April 16, 2011).


If the Russians think that nuclear winter is a KGB hoax, as the FBI white paper's cited source Comrade J alleges, then why do the leaders of this Russian conference on climate change seem to be considering geoengineering ("climate stabilization using new technologies") to cool the planet? The Russians are considering putting aerosols in the atmosphere in order to reflect the sun. Evidently, the Russians are considering creating a "controlled" nuclear winter.


The Russian conference discusses adapting to and mitigating the problem of global warming, but they also anticipate that global warming will bring some benefits. They mention limiting emissions of greenhouse gasses, but they don't say people should replace fossil-fuels with renewable sources of energy.  See the short-sighted "vision" of the conference. (See my earlier post on the Russian conference.)


Still, the Russians have clearly accepted man-made climate change. President Medvedev claimed in early 2010 that global warming was a "tricky campaign." After the 2010 forest fires, President Medvedev reversed himself and claimed that man was causing global warming.


During the fires, Andrei Areshev, a lunatic attached to a Foreign Ministry drunk tank, even claimed right in the Russian government's official press agency RIA Novosti that those sneaky U.S. climate scientists were causing global warming by beaming secret climate weapons at Russia!


Now, it seems that scientists are experimenting with ways to geoengineer the climate. When we have droughts and floods, probably some people will be suspicious that these new technologies are being used as weapons. Wouldn't it be better to concentrate our efforts on renewable energy? 

University of Virginia: Judge Rules on Motions in Michael Mann Email Case

"A court in Virginia agreed yesterday that Michael Mann did have standing to join the ATI vs UVa lawsuit (unsurprising) and also agreed to UVa's request to reopen the consent decree that UVa had signed with ATI (again unsurprising)....

UVa successfully argued that the original arrangement should be re-opened mainly because they were unable to trust the ATI lawyers to maintain confidentiality of the process. This is not a surprising argument given the amount of misrepresentation, disinformation and hyperbole seen in any of their filings, and even more so in their public pronouncements, but it was strengthened enormously by the behaviour of David Schnare in the process of this lawsuit itself.

Schnare, it turns out, was actually a federal civil servant with EPA(!) until a few months ago. According to Nature News, he misrepresented himself in communications with UVa, furthermore, he was not granted permission to engage in outside activity for ATI by his federal employers."---Climate Science FOI Report (11-2-11)

The University of Virginia has posted the following press release about the case (11-2-11):

Judge Rules on Motions in Mann Email Case

November 3, 2011 — A Prince William County Circuit Court judge Tuesday granted a motion in favor of the University of Virginia and another filed on behalf of former faculty member Michael Mann.

Mann, formerly an environmental sciences professor in U.Va.'s College of Arts & Sciences, is one of the scientists whose email was hacked from the University of East Anglia in November 2009. Climate-change skeptics seized on the emails and claim they show that scientists falsified their research to support the idea that the Earth's climate is warming.

Ensuing controversy has raised two important issues: Does political pressure have a chilling effect on scientists who pursue research that may become unpopular politically? And do scientists have the academic freedom to communicate with confidence that these communications won't become public and then misconstrued?

The motions granted Tuesday relate to a January Freedom of Information Act request from the American Tradition Institute for extensive records, including Mann's email from his time on the U.Va. faculty from 1999 to 2005. ATI filed suit in May, claiming that U.Va. was too slow to comply and was unfairly charging for providing the emails. ATI's suit also requested that a process be put in place to minimize the number of excluded emails the court would need to review.

The University has already released hundreds of non-exempt records in response to the Freedom of Information request. Prince William County Circuit Court Judge Gaylord Finch earlier ruled that U.Va. had followed Virginia law in passing along to ATI its costs for reviewing and providing the non-exempt emails.

Finch Tuesday granted the University's motion that a protective order governing the review of the exempt emails be revisited. At issue is how the University can demonstrate that the approximately 12,000 documents it considers exempt are indeed exempt under the law.

Also, Finch granted a motion – supported by the University and opposed by ATI – to allow Mann, now a professor at Pennsylvania State University, to intervene in the case. Court rules allow a person who is not party to a lawsuit to intervene and become a party if that person's interests are sufficiently distinct from the other parties' interests that he or she should be represented. Mann's lawyer will work in partnership with University counsel going forward.

"We were very pleased with the judge's decisions and feel they were proper and appropriate," said Richard C. Kast, who presented the University's arguments with co-counsel Madelyn Wessel Tuesday. Each is an associate legal counsel at U.Va.

The earlier order would have allowed David Schnare and Christopher Horner, lawyers and staff members for ATI, to examine all of Mann's emails to see whether they agreed with the University's classifying them as exempt and, if not, to collaborate with University lawyers to select representative emails to be reviewed by the judge.

Although Schnare and Horner would have been required to keep the content of the emails confidential under terms of the order, scientific groups have protested that it is improper to release all of them for review and questioned whether the confidentiality pledge would be upheld. The University shared their concerns.

The University and ATI now have until Dec. 20 to agree on a new process in which a neutral third party would have access to the complete records and select samples on which the parties will make their arguments to the court under the Virginia FOIA.

Russian Bloggers Accuse Russian Spy Anna Chapman of Plagiarism

"You can't call this a normal situation," says Alexei Lukatsky, an Internet specialist. "It's becoming rather common to appropriate someone else's ideas, without giving proper attribution. If there are no consequences, it will just become more common."---Christian Science Monitor (2-2-11)


The Washington Post (10-31-11) reports that on Halloween, the FBI posted more information about the Russian spy Anna Chapman on their site. The FBI investigation was code-named "Ghost Stories" because the spies took the names of dead people.


The FBI boasts that the Russian spies never stole a single secret in ten years, and the Russians seem to concede the point. If this is true, perhaps the FBI has time to investigate if any people in America were involved in the cyber-theft of the emails of the world's most famous climate scientists from the computer at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. These cyber-criminals stole the emails in order to spread disinformation about the supposed conspiracies of Western climate scientists so they could torpedo the Copenhagen Conference. Instead, the FBI seems to be spreading disinformation about Western climate scientists in a so-called FBI "white paper." See here and here for some background.


This week, Russian bloggers are accusing Chapman of plagiarism in connection with an article she published in Komsomolskaya Pravda. The article is titled  "Если бы Пушкин успел написать свои зрелые произведения, то, возможно, не было бы революции и убийства царя!" (10-31-11). ["If Pushkin had managed to write his mature works, then perhaps there would not have been a revolution and the czar would not have been killed."]


The Guardian (11-2-11) explains:


Since her expulsion from the US last year for spying, Anna Chapman has reinvented herself as an entrepreneur, TV personality, and cheerleader for the Kremlin.


But the 29-year-old has also become a growing target for ridicule over her role in a series of state-promoted PR stunts.


Now she faces claims that she plagiarised a controversial Kremlin spin doctor in the column she writes for a tabloid newspaper.


Prominent bloggers say Chapman copied almost word for word a passage from a book by Oleg Matveyechev in her article for the mass market Komsomolskaya Pravda on Alexander Pushkin, Russia's most revered poet.


Chapman argued that the bloody Bolshevik revolution of 1917 would never have happened had Pushkin not been killed in a duel in 1837 at the age of 37.


"Just half a century later, liberals and socialists flooded Russia and killed the tsar, and then set the course for the revolution," she wrote. "I'm confident that things would have been different if Pushkin had managed to write his mature works."


But bloggers said her text was almost a direct copy of a passage from a book by Matveyechev, a member of prime minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia


Matveyechev's 2009 book, The Sovereignty of the Soul, goes further, describing Pushkin's death as an anti-Russian plot organised by Europe. Chapman merely argues that, had he lived, Pushkin could have become "a poet whose global historical significance would have surpassed that of Homer and Shakespeare". [See full text.]


The U.K. Telegraph (11-2-11) suggests that Matveyechev may have actually ghost-written Chapman's article:


Mr Matveyechev, a politician in Vladimir Putin's United Russia party, is unlikely to object though. Based in Miss Chapman's native Volgograd, he has collaborated with her on a number of projects in the past, stoking speculation that he may have actually ghostwritten the offending article itself.


The Christian Science Monitor (2-11-11) reports:


The release of the FBI materials about Chapman and her fellow sleeper agents has reinvigorated a debate among Russian security experts about what Russian secret services thought they were doing by planting so many spies in seemingly ordinary, suburban American lives.


Some argue that the 10 agents, who never uncovered a single classified secret during a decade of working in the US, were not actually spies at all but just "moochers" living off the budget of the SVR, Russia's intelligence service.

Dr. Michael Mann Confronts Attorney General Cuccinelli's Mafia in a Prince William County, Virginia Courtroom

This post has updated and corrected material.


Michael Mann posts on Twitter: "Judge rules against ATI and in our and UVa's favor. We may intervene in case. UVa allowed to renegotiate protective order. details to come.."


The Institute for Southern Studies has documented how money from fossil-fuel interests are driving the legal attack on an American hero, the climate scientist Michael Mann. The ISS article is titled Who's Behind the Information Attacks on Climate Scientists?" (October 2011). This article also appears on Climate Progress (10-31-2011).


The ISS article also notes that an important hearing is set for today:


The hearing on the American Tradition Institute's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the University of Virginia seeking [climate scientist] Michael Mann's records is set for Tuesday, Nov. 1 before Judge Gaylord Finch in Prince William County Court. The hearing was postponed from September after Finch said he wanted to allow more time for arguments because of the case's significance. [Please read the entire article.]


In a post on DeSmogblog, computer scientist John Mashey reveals that Milton Johns, an attorney for Professor Ed Wegman, who is under investigation by George Mason University for academic misconduct, is Attorney General Cuccinelli's former law partner. Attorney General Cuccinelli used the discredited "Wegman Report" as evidence that Dr. Mann fabricated his research and misused government money. Mashey's article is titled "Curious Coincidences at George Mason University: Ed Wegman, Milton Johns, and Ken Cuccinelli" (10-30-2011).


A blog titled Climate Science FOI (Freedom of Information) Report reveals in an article titled "ATI & UVa: Reopening the review of exempted material" (11-2-2011) that the main lawyer for the American Tradition Institute (ATI), David Schnare, did not have permission from his employer, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to represent the ATI. Not only that, a document submitted to the court by the University of Virginia (UVA) suggests that David Schnare probably fabricated information that suggested he had permission to represent the ATI.


It seems to me that Attorney General Cuccinelli and the other third-rate lawyer-operatives, who falsely accuse the famous climate scientist Dr. Mann of a conspiracy, are way out of their league. Attorney General Cuccinelli has hijacked the Office of Attorney General in order to persecute Dr. Mann on behalf of the fossil-fuel industry. His actions put the national security of the United States at risk.


The University of Virginia has posted their perspective on Virginia's Freedom of Information Laws here. See further information on their sidebar and homepage. Perhaps they will post a press release about the November 1, 2011 hearing before Judge Gaylord Finch.