RICHMOND Va. – Conservative Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is investigating a former University of Virginia professor’s climate change research.
The Republican is demanding papers from the university as part of an inquiry of whether Michael Mann defrauded taxpayers by using manipulated data to seek money to back his research.
Cuccinelli dismisses assertions that manmade gasses cause the planet to warm. He has sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency challenging its authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
Since his days in the Virginia Senate, he has rejected the principle that exhaust from industry and vehicles has warmed the earth’s overall temperatures, contributing to decades-long droughts on some continents and the thawing of polar ice caps.
Cuccinelli also found his way into headlines in January for advising officials at state-supported colleges in Virginia not to consider sexual orientation as a basis for enforcing legal protections against discrimination.
The attorney general was out of the office on Tuesday and unable to immediately comment, said his spokesman Brian J. Gottstein.
Gottstein said the investigation is a legitimate inquiry that follows up on a controversy last year when climate change skeptics obtained nearly 1,000 e-mails stolen from a British university and claimed it proved scientists had exaggerated the threat of global warming.
