Michael Mann Had Better Tread Lightly At Work…
…because he might find his co-workers at Penn State’s Earth Systems Science Center (ESSC) are out to get him in light of an e-mail which went out to all 27 of them over the weekend.
From a post on the great new site Climategate.com:
An “inconvenient truth” for Mann is that an ally of ours, former CIA agent Kent Clizbe, has this weekend emailed the proxy professor’s co-workers with details of the tempting offer that could turn 2010 into quite a prosperous New Year. We hope someone at this premiere world research institution will come forward and substantiate the facts from evidence already uncovered from the government emails leaked on November 19, 2009. The emails, among other things, show correspondence between Michael Mann and British Professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research, which discuss methods to “hide the decline” in global temperatures.
If any of the dozens of co-workers in the US or the UK are prepared to give evidence, even if it doesn’t lead to any convictions, they could benefit from a share of tens of millions of dollars in recovered public funds. The Whistleblower idea came up in Internet discussions with top US fraud lawyer, Joel Hesch, of Hesch and Associates and former CIA agent, Kent Clizbe. Clizbe’s idea was to email the offer to all 27 of Mann’s co-workers at Penn State’s Earth System Science Center (ESSC) this weekend.
Whether convictions are obtained or not, Mr. Hesch assures prospective whistleblowers they will receive a substantial share of any monies recovered. Federal investigators reward whistleblowers with an average payment of $1.5 million based on the sums of money recovered. The US Federal government has paid out almost $3 billion so far in such rewards. The largest rewards to date exceed $150 million, and one out of every five applicants gets a monetary reward. Estimates of the total sums invested in government climate research already exceed $50 billion. The offer put on the table to Mann’s colleagues could be the most lucrative whistleblower deal ever made.
This could get interesting. Those of us who have followed the Climategate scandal have been waiting for the other shoe to drop since the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit data dump in November proved that ESSC director Mann and several other prominent advocates of the anthropogenic global warming theory have been engaged in cooking the books on temperature data and hijacking the peer-review process. No similar disclosures have been made on this side of the pond, though with the frequent turning up of personages like Mann, Ben Santer, Kevin Trenberth, Steven Schneider, Tom Wigley and others in the CRU e-mails one wonders what the picture would look like if all of the American side of the AGW advocacy movement were subjected tot he same scrutiny as East Anglia has been.
To that end, author and researcher Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute has sued NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in response to having his Freedom of Information Act requests on NASA’s temperature data and methods repeatedly denied. Goddard’s director James Hansen, whose name appears in the CRU e-mails, is a media hog frequently appearing in the press with dire and loopy predictions of apocalypse as a result of carbon dioxide emissions; his hard drive and Goddard’s servers would constitute something of a Holy Grail for AGW skeptics in the wake of the CRU disclosure.
The whistleblower offer may not turn up much; without knowing much about any of the 27 employees at Mann’s Penn State shop it’s a reasonable assumption to say they were likely hand-picked for their commitment to AGW as gospel, and given the rather nasty character of the CRU e-mail threads he was involved with one imagines that taking on Mann as a whistleblower is akin to jumping into a shark tank. But all it takes is one unhappy camper at ESSC to forward a few e-mails in pursuit of federal bonus cash and we’ll have CRU, Part Two on our hands. And as time goes on it’s quite likely Clizbe and Hersch will be marketing the whistleblower idea not just to Mann’s coworkers but those of Hansen, Schneider, Wigley, Santer, Trenberth and others as well.
Filed under: Corruption, Environment
