Having been hounded by Virginia’s attorney general, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli, the climate scientist Michael E. Mann is getting payback by being a leading voice of opposition to the Republican politician’s gubernatorial campaign.
Mr. Mann, a former University of Virginia professor who now directs Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Center, returned to Charlottesville, Va., this week for his third appearance at a rally for Mr. Cuccinelli’s Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe.
As he has been doing elsewhere since early summer, Mr. Mann accused Mr. Cuccinelli of having mounted a “witch hunt” against him by trying, unsuccessfully, to force UVa to hand over correspondence between him and other climate researchers. He denounced Mr. Cuccinelli as a threat to the state’s scientific researchers and economy, and painted Mr. McAuliffe, whom he went on to introduce, as far more supportive of science and innovation.
Such stumping on behalf of Mr. McAuliffe is just one of many ways in which Mr. Mann has sought to hurt Mr. Cuccinelli’s chances of being elected governor next Tuesday. He also has been criticizing the Republican candidate as antiscience in speeches and news-media interviews promoted on his own website and Facebook page. He recently narrated a web ad for the NextGen Climate Action, an environmental advocacy group, in which he says climate change is eroding Virginia’s shoreline and hurting its crops, and accuses Mr. Cuccinelli of doing the bidding of fossil-fuel companies “in trying to attack the science of climate change by attacking me.”
Mr. Mann also has weighed in on Virginia’s race for an attorney general to replace Mr. Cuccinelli. He has endorsed the Democratic candidate, Mark R. Herring, who had opposed Mr. Cuccinelli’s investigation of him, over the Republican candidate, Mark D. Obenshain, whom he has criticized as too similar to Mr. Cuccinelli in his views.
Jordan E. Kurland, associate general secretary of the American Association of University Professors and a member of that organization’s staff since 1964, said on Thursday that he could not recall any other case of a college faculty member’s taking such a high-profile role in trying to influence the outcome of a state’s elections.
Mr. Cuccinelli’s campaign did not return calls seeking comment. A statement posted on its website denies that Mr. Cuccinelli’s efforts to obtain emails between Mr. Mann and other climate scientists were motivated by any sort of disagreement over science. Instead, it says, Mr. Cuccinelli was seeking to review University of Virginia documents to determine “whether any false statements had been made in an effort to obtain taxpayer funding.”
Mr. Cuccinelli has never put forward a clear basis for such suspicions, however, other than to cite Mr. Mann’s listing of controversial climate-change papers on his curriculum vitae in applying for a state research grant.
Turning the Tables
In an interview this week, Mr. Mann said he had never before publicly staked out a partisan position in an election, but found doing so at the request of the McAuliffe campaign to be “an easy decision,” considering the differences between the two candidates’ views on science. He described himself as having been pulled into the fray as a result of being “subjected to politically partisan attacks.”
Mr. Mann’s decision to go after Mr. Cuccinelli represents a stark reversal. Until early last year, the climate researcher was on the defensive as the attorney general sought in court to force the University of Virginia to surrender thousands of pages of email messages and other documents stemming from correspondence between Mr. Mann and 39 other scholars.
Mr. Cuccinelli began his quest for the documents in 2010, in response to the so-called ClimateGate scandal arising from the theft of researcher emails from a server at the University of East Anglia, in England. The emails gave rise to allegations that the researchers had withheld information from the public and had otherwise engaged in hardball tactics to keep the existence of anthropogenic climate change from being questioned. Mr. Mann, who was among those whose emails were leaked, had gained prominence early in his academic career as a co-creator of the “hockey stick” graph, which shows an upward spike in global temperatures in the last century.
The statement on the Cuccinelli campaign’s website alleges that Mr. Mann’s emails exposed him as having engaged in “unprecedented deceit and bullying.” Mr. Cuccinelli. a vocal skeptic of climate-change research, sought to obtain Mr. Mann’s correspondence at the University of Virginia, where he was an assistant professor in the environmental-sciences department from 1999 until he moved to Penn State, in 2005. The attorney general kept up his investigation long after a British investigative panel largely cleared the researchers whose emails had been leaked from East Anglia and after Mr. Mann had been cleared of scientific wrongdoing by Penn State.
The Virginia Supreme Court finally brought an end to the investigation last year, dismissing Mr. Cuccinelli’s lawsuit against UVa based on its finding that the attorney general had wrongly applied an antifraud statute to seek documents to which he was not entitled.
Mr. Mann could have stayed mum about Virginia’s gubernatorial race and still become a factor in it. His clash with Mr. Cuccinelli and the millions of dollars in legal costs that it generated for taxpayers have been cited in many of Mr. McAuliffe’s speeches and campaign ads, and in newspaper editorials endorsing the Democratic candidate.
The climate researcher acknowledged that his high degree of involvement in a state gubernatorial race was unusual, but said he felt he had no choice but to fight back against those who have attacked his research.
“It is not about my politics,” Mr. Mann said. “It is not about my personal views.” He said he was seeking to defeat a gubernatorial candidate who represents “a potential threat to the people of Virginia because of the way he holds science in contempt.”
“If scientists don’t engage in the public discourse in this way,” he argued, “then the voices of antiscience will prevail.”
