The Conspiracy Continues...

Remember Michael Mann?

He's the Penn State scientist who got caught up in that "Climategate" hoax (the hoax being that those stolen emails somehow proved that Global Warming is itself a hoax - they didn't, thus the hoax).

There were a number of allegations of scientific impropriety made and some were dismissed early. I wrote about it here.

Well Mann's been cleared of the last allegation by Penn State.

And to his credit, Mike Cronin over at the Trib closes the loop on the story:

A Penn State University panel of scientists on Thursday exonerated one of the school's researchers of accusations that his work on climate change violated the university's research misconduct policy.

After a four-month investigation, five university professors unanimously cleared professor Michael Mann, a climate scientist and one of several hundred researchers sharing the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their work with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The Penn State investigators concluded in a report released yesterday that "Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities."

Here's the report, if you wanted to read it.

David Templeton's got basically the same story at the P-G. But considering the repeated rhetorical beatings Mann has suffered at the hands of the Trib's editorial board, I wanted to highlight Cronin's piece over Templeton's.

So, you may well be asking your collective selves now, what sort of beatings has Mann taken from the Richard Mellon Scaife's braintrust?

Take a look at this from January:

Granting more than half a million federal stimulus dollars to a professor whose Climategate role prompted a Penn State University investigation is politically motivated misuse of public money at its worst.

Michael Mann received the three-year, $541,184 grant in June, according to The National Center for Public Policy Research, a nonpartisan educational foundation in Washington. Creator of the discredited "hockey stick" temperature graph that purportedly buttressed the case for man-made global warming, he's a key figure in the leaked Climategate e-mails that show data were manipulated and destroyed and contrary research was suppressed to bolster scientifically suspect climate-change orthodoxy.

Penn State is right to scrutinize Mr. Mann's "scholarship." But the university need not await its own decision on his future employment to do the right thing for taxpayers. As the center urges, Penn State should return the money to the U.S. Treasury immediately.

Whoever approved Mann's grant should be removed from the public payroll. And all other stimulus grants should be reviewed to tell taxpayers just how much of their money was misspent to promote Democrat eco-wacko dogma under the dubious stimulus guise of "job creation."

Will the braintrust be correcting itself anytime soon? Will the braintrust apologize to "whoever approved Mann's grant" and say it was wrong to call for that person's "remov[al] from the public payroll"?

And how will it address Mann and it's own "Climategate" hoax from now on, considering that one of its own reporters has reported in the Tribune-Review that Mann's been "exonerated"?