A conservative group granted access to controversial climate change research documents from the University of Virginia on Wednesday says it will post those documents on the Internet, a move that Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli said wouldn’t necessarily lead him to drop legal action seeking similar documents. “Anything we get we are going to post,” said David Schnare, an attorney for the American Tradition Institute, which filed a Freedom of Information Act request in January seeking documents related to former U.Va. professor Michael Mann, whose research on climate change has drawn the ire of global warming skeptics.
A Prince William County judge this week ordered the university to turn over documents the university believes are subject to public disclosure by Aug. 22. A separate order requires the university to allow the group to review documents it believes are exempt from public disclosure by Sept. 21.
The institute secured the release of documents similar to the ones denied to Cuccinelli by the courts last year. Cuccinelli said he needed the documents to determine if Mann defrauded taxpayers by taking state funds for his academic work.
Mann is associated with the infamous “hockey stick” graph that charts a rapid increase in the Earth’s temperature during the 20th century. He has been cleared of charges that he manipulated information to demonstrate the swift spike.
Cuccinelli said he’s waiting to see what documents the university releases before deciding how to proceed with his own demands.
“It’s kind of hard to tell what isn’t produced,” he said. “You don’t see what isn’t there, so we’ll see how the process unfolds.”
If [the university] essentially disgorge everything, then there’s no cause for them to be going to court to try and cover it up,” he added. “You know, you wouldn’t think if you’re going to respond to a FOIA you wouldn’t respond to a subpoena.”
Mann on Wednesday derided efforts to discredit his research.
“I think its very unfortunate that fossil fuel industry-funded climate change deniers … continue to harass U.Va., NASA, and other leading academic and scientific institutions with these frivolous attacks,” he said.
