Virginia's Climate Follies 2.0: Cooch's Climate Crusade

The WaPo, which has been subjected to well-earned criticism for its coverage of climate science and policy, demonstrates in an editorial today that it does have at least some clue regarding the witch hunt currently being perpetrated by the Virginia Attorney General. Under the headline, "Ken Cuccinelli seems determined to embarrass Virginia", the editorial points out:

The attorney general's logic is so tenuous as to leave only one plausible explanation: that he is on a fishing expedition designed to intimidate and suppress honest research and the free exchange of ideas upon which science and academia both depend -- all because he does not like what science says about climate change.

This sums up the situation quite well as far as it goes, but the WaPo crew are missing a golden opportunity to expose the real fraud behind this abortion of a legal case. (BTW, isn't the Cooch vehemently opposed to abortion?) Leaving aside the issue of whether the "real journalists" should have done the heavy lifting, a meticulous dossier has already been assembled in the blogosphere regarding the fraudulent underpinnings of the Cooch's crusade. In a guest post at the Deep Climate blog, John Mashey summarizes his exhaustive 200+ page analysis of the questionable scholarship, including multiple instances of apparent outright plagiarism, behind the GMU-based Wegman Report, upon which much of the Virginia AG's case is based:

The report itself contains numerous cases of obvious bias, as do process, testimony and follow-on actions. Of 91 pages, 35 are mostly plagiarized text, but often injected with errors, bias and changes of meaning. Its Bibliography is mostly padding, 50% of the references uncited in the text. Many references are irrelevant or dubious. The team relied heavily on a long-obsolete sketch and very likely on various uncredited sources.

In addition to evidence of the apparent fraud being perpetrated on the campus of George Mason, it might also be useful to investigate the finances of a "non-profit" organization evidently operating out of an apartment at:

1600 South Eads Street, Suite #712-S
Arlington, VA 22202-2907
Tel/Fax 703-920-2744

Image (click to enlarge): Tom Toles cartoon, Oct. 6, 2010, from Washington Post