Cuccinelli's Baseless Editorial

In the March 2, 2010 print edition of the Virginian Pilot, the Commonwealth's attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, responded to an editorial which had pointed out his anti-science stance with regard to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Cuccinelli, who claims that the overwhelming evidence for AGW is based on doctored data by a few fraudulent scientists, is asking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to revisit greenhouse gas (GHG) emission regulations "that will further impoverish those in Virginia who are already struggling." In his opinion piece, he attempts to refute the predictions for rising sea levels by pointing out that a paper that confirmed past IPCC projections, was recently retracted.

Two days after you published your baseless editorial, Professor Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol, who had published papers upon which the IPCC relied, has gone so far as to retract his most recent ocean rise paper.

Cuccinelli goes on to say that therefore, EPA's rationale for regulating GHGs is "based on scientific conclusions that have now been formally withdrawn." Anyone with a cursory exposure to this topic should spot the fallacy in this argument. Does Cuccinelli seriously believe that the EPA regulates contaminants on the basis of a single research paper? How could the EPA propose to regulate GHGs in 2008 based on a paper published in July 2009? Or does Cuccinelli think that the retraction of a single paper invalidates all prior research?

Ken Cuccinelli's intellectual dishonesty (or shortcomings?) becomes even more obvious when you actually read the retraction published by Mark Siddall and co-workers. The last sentence states

We thank S. Rahmstorf and M. Vermeer for bringing these issues to our attention.

Rahmstorf and Vermeer dissected Siddall's approach on Realclimate and came to the conclusion that the researchers' projections were based on a flawed methodology. In December 2009, Vermeer and Rahmstorf published a study with new sea level rise predictions that are more than twice as high as those in the retracted paper.

I wonder how Cuccinelli, who praised the retraction saying "This is how peer review is supposed to work," will spin these new findings to fit his political agenda. I hope he is more proficient as Virginia's "Top Lawman" than as a spin-doctor or climate scientist... but I am not holding my breath. For starters, he may want to visit NOAA's Tides & Currents for a first-hand look at sea level trends.