The Telegraph reports that Michael Mann of climategate's Hockey Stick fame, received a surprise today, a notice to all his colleagues that there's an effort to collect data on misuse of federal funds in his operation in an effort to mount a Federal False Claims Act suit: Michael Mann - creator of the incredible Hockey Stick curve and one of the scientists most heavily implicated in the Climategate scandal - is about to get a very nasty shock. When he turns up to work on Monday, he'll find that all 27 of his colleagues at the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University have received a rather tempting email inviting them to blow the whistle on anyone they know who may have been fraudulently misusing federal grant funds for climate research.
Under US law, regardless of whether or not a prosecution results, the whistleblower stands to make very large sums of money: it is based on a percentage of the total government funds which have been misused, in this case perhaps as much as $50 million. (Hat tip: John O'Sullivan of the wonderful new campaigning site www.climategate.com)
I wonder what took so long and how many other labs will be getting similar letters.
An online friend reports that the BBC's science section, a former flogger of AGW has not mentioned one word about the subject so far this year--probably because the journos there are freezing as Britain and much of Europe faces bitter cold weather.
The Guardian, however, ignores the freezing cold affecting so much of the globe in a story about how Peru's mountain people are dying out under the cold, reporting risibly that this group stands out in a world which is becoming increasingly warmer. Perhaps those reporters phoned in the story from a sauna in Lima. In a world growing ever hotter, Huancavelica is an anomaly. These communities, living at the edge of what is possible, face extinction because of increasingly cold conditions in their own microclimate, which may have been altered by the rapid melting of the glaciers.
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