Cooch's climate change suit screwed the pooch

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli got some bad news today.

The Virginia Supreme Court today sided with the University of Virginia in its fight against the state attorney general's investigation of former U.Va. climate scientist Michael Mann.
The court upheld the Albemarle Circuit Court ruling setting aside Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's civil investigative demands for documents related to grants Mann receive to study global warming.

To read the entire article at the Richmond Times-Dispatch web site go here. 

In answering the suit Cuccinelli filed against the University of Virginia in 2010 the school's attorneys asserted this: 

The Attorney General's opposition itself makes clear that Attorney General did not issue the civil investigative demands under the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers act to investigate fraud on Commonwealth taxpayers.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.

In a 41-page brief filed on July 13, 2010, Cuccinelli answered that a cadre of conspiratorial scientists, including Michael Mann who once worked at UVa., have been doctoring their conclusions for years.

Well, I am among those who accept that when the vast majority (99 percent?) of scientists say that pollution is affecting the climate in a way that's dangerous to our species that it's true. I don't believe they are making it up, just to get grants.

However, Cuccinelli has said he believes the scientists are lying, conspiring to perpetrate a hoax, and that’s basically what he was trying to find evidence of with this suit. Unfortunately for Cuccinelli, he hasn't been able to find enough Luddite judges to agree with him; not even in Virginia.  

Still, that’s how Flat-Earth Republicans operate. They pick at scabs, hoping fresh blood from yesterday’s thought-to-be-healed problems will distract Democrats so much they will lose their focus on today’s battles. 

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Update: Perhaps self-styled climate scientist Ken Cuccinelli should go to Marysville, Indiana, and explain to the folks how climate change had nothing to do with the tornado that wiped out their town today. He might say that since real scientists can’t prove if a particular tornado was made more severe by man-made pollution, then there’s no such thing as climate change.