UVa responds to Cuccinelli in climate dispute

By: Daily Progress Staff Reports | Daily Progress
Published: July 20, 2010

The University of Virginia has filed a response this afternoon to Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who has been trying to subpoena UVa’s documents relating to the research of a former UVa climate change scientist.

UVa’s document, which was filed this afternoon in Albemarle County Circuit Court, accuses Cuccinelli of only being interested in Michael Mann’s scientific conclusions and not making connections between the critiques to the $466,000 in federal and state research grants that Mann received between 1999 and 2005.

“The Attorney General’s opposition itself makes clear that the Attorney General did not issue civil investigative demands under the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act to investigate fraud against Virginia taxpayers,” the document said. “Rather the CIDs were issued in an unprecedented attempt to challenge a university professor’s peer-reviewed data, methodologies and conclusions. But FATA does not authorize the Attorney General to police academic debate, and it certainly does not authorize the Attorney General to target for government investigation those who conduct scientific research with which the Attorney General disagrees.”

The documents reference research that Mann worked on in the late 1990s at the University of Massachusetts that gave rise to the “hockey stick” graph, which shows a slight cooling trend from 1000 A.D. onward until a sharp rise in temperatures in the 1900s. The data paints a different picture of historical temperatures than previously reported.

Cuccinelli’s previous filing said Mann might have used the “misleading” data on his grant applications at UVa. UVa said in the brief filed today that the attorney general’s “real complaint is with the public policy implications of Dr. Mann’s scientific conclusions and his presentation of those conclusions in a particular graphical depiction,” the brief said.

In today’s filings, UVa restated that the CIDs fail the core requirements of an investigation under the act - a statement of “the nature of the conduct constituting the alleged violation” and a “reason to believe” that UVa as the CID recipient has data about a violation of Virginia’s anti-fraud law.

The university also said that the act defines UVa as part of the Commonwealth instead of as an individual person, and that Commonwealth entities would be exempt from an investigation under the act “unless named expressly or included by necessary implication.”

Read more of this story in Wednesday’s edition of The Daily Progress.

UVa responds to Cuccinelli in climate dispute

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