Cuccinelli Takes Climate Change to the Courts

Last week, a judge halted VA attorney general Ken Cuccinelli's probe into a climate scientist's funding. But will Cuccinelli continue trying to discredit climate science?

“Protective cognition” is a social science term for the tendency of individuals to dismiss evidence of risks that contradicts how they see the world.

That might be one explanation for the persistence of skepticism about climate change science and why some are willing to go to such extremes to impeach evidence for a human imprint on the climate – such as Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s attempt to turn a question about climate science into a criminal proceeding.

Last week, a state judge turned down Cuccinelli’s demand for documents related to grant funding of climate scientist Michael Mann, who published the now-famous “hockey stick” study showing a dramatic rise in global average temperatures over the past century.

Debunking the hockey stick has been de rigueur for climate skeptics. They’re still at it, even though a 2006 National Academy of Sciences review of Mann’s work concluded that he largely got it right, and even though a Pennsylvania State University review this year dismissed claims that arose out of the manufactured “climategate” controversy that Mann fiddled the numbers to make the hockey stick come out the way it did.

Cuccinelli is determined to push his claim that Mann is a fraud, despite his loss in court. Albemarle County Judge Paul Peatross saw no reason to indulge Cuccinelli’s fishing expedition. In the more measured terms of a court ruling, Judge Peatross said: “What the attorney general suspects that Dr. Mann did that was false or fraudulent in obtaining (research) funds from the Commonwealth (of Virginia) is simply not stated.”

What is simply stated is that there’s no there there. And even if there were, the case for a human fingerprint on the climate does not rest largely or even significantly with the hockey stick. As the National Academy of Sciences review noted: “Surface temperature reconstructions for periods prior to the industrial era are only one of multiple lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that climatic warming is occurring in response to human activities, and they are not the primary evidence."

Cuccinelli vows to press his claim. Facts seem to be secondary to his particular form of political correctness. He seems to be singing his own version of an old Tina Turner tune: What’s evidence got to do with it? As Virginia’s Attorney General, Cuccinelli should know better.