Saturday, July 21, 2012

"Was #climate science the real reason the strategic dynamos on UVA's board wanted president Sullivan gone?"

Twitter / GasBlast: Was #climate science the r ...
[retweeted by Michael Mann] Was #climate science the real reason the strategic dynamos on UVA's board wanted president Sullivan gone? http://www.daskrap.com/2012/7/mann-and-corporate-person-uva … @MichaelEMann
mann and corporate person at uva | DASKRAPITAL
Was climate science the real reason the strategic dynamos on the UVA board wanted president Teresa Sullivan gone? The fund manager behind the coup is "very, very angry" that I would even ask…

When I first heard news of the coup attempt at the University of Virginia, I wondered if it had anything to do with climate change.
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But not a month later, hostilities were flaring again, when the UVA environmental sciences department voted to hire Michael Mann back to UVA, a development that quickly leaked to “Drudge of Denial” Marc Morano and began making the rounds on the right wing Virginia state politics blogs, with anti-commuter rail crusader D.J. McGuire dubbing the news “beyond belief” and “a slap in the face to the voters and taxpayers of the Commonwealth” and the anonymous Blue Ridge Mountain-based blogger From on High scoffing that he himself wouldn't hire Mann “to trim my lawn, much less represent my once-prestigious university to the scientific world” and adding:
Some wonder why Mann isn't in prison for having fostered and perpetrated[sic] the most egregious scientific fraud in the history of the planet…Let's hope this is a vicious - and false - rumor. The University of Virginia has too good a reputation to be going down this road (though this character did, not long ago, stain its halls with his presence). Might UVa make the same mistake twice? Might the university rehire the one man most responsible for the scandal that is global warming theory? Stranger things have ha ... Well, no they haven't. The disgraced Michael Mann being invited back to UVA would truly be a bizarre act on someone's part. Stay tuned. This may get weird.
It never did. Within days, Mann was told that he hadn’t gotten the job, that it had been “bogged down” by Dean Meredith Woo...

But Mann still didn’t get the job, and not six weeks after that Teresa Sullivan was sacked at the hands of the very vice rector who had put up the funds for Mann’s would-be professorship, the Alexandria money manager Mark Kington. In the publicity frenzy that followed, however, only the professional climate science denialist Anthony Watts drew any connection between the two events, expressing mild dismay that the fellow had executed the plan so clumsily...And then [Mark Kington, the board’s vice rector] mentioned “libel” again and accused me of diminishing his deep “commitment to climate change.”

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