As correctly reported yesterday in American Thinker the civil litigation net will soon be cast far and wide in the U.S. skilfully applying the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).

Although RICO laws were intended to bust Mafia crimes they have successfully been employed in civil lawsuits, too. RICO-based claims will certainly be wending their way to brokers who did not perform the SEC’s necessary “due diligence” research before peddling those dodgy carbon shares.

But more pointedly for climate sceptics, such litigation will bear the names of co-defendants, Al Gore and that ‘team’ of IPCC scientists who participated in blocking the publication of contrary research, cooking the data and whose annual income skyrocketed from the public hysteria.

Not just in the United States, but throughout the world, leaders are under increasing pressure to respond to the seriousness of these matters. In the U.S. we now have the release of the much-anticipated report from the Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW). Spokesman and Minority leader Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) has stated the need for an international criminal investigation into what he called, “unethical and potentially illegal behavior by some the world’s leading climate scientists.”

In his presentation of the EPW’s report, Inhofe emphasized the significant finding of the British Government that data destruction at the CRU was criminal.

This announcement will have considerable impact upon President Barack Obama’s climate change policy that is unravelling in the wake of a barrage of US lawsuits challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) directives. With the abstaining American press increasingly accused of cronyism to politicians, in Britain the climate data fraud is more conscientiously reported by national daily publications such as, ‘The Telegraph.’

At last, skeptic politicians and large corporations are heeding the advice of legal commentators to use the law as the best way to bust what Inhofe terms, “the greatest scientific scandal of our generation.”

Since the Climategate scandal first broke, I’ve been urging fellow skeptics to stop prevaricating over the esoteric finer points subsumed in the darkened confines of science laboratories and, instead, shine the cold light of legal reason on these crooks in public courtrooms. Only then, under the penalty of perjury, will taxpayers glean the truth from climate fraudsters.

I was pleased to analyse for readers that very detailed and robust legal petition filed by the world’s largest coal company, the Peabody Energy Corporation (PEC), that is a superb template for any litigant looking to file their own suit.

PEC shrewdly argues inter alia that the law requires that the federal agency must articulate a “rational connection between the facts found and the choice made” as per the case of Motor Vehicle Mfrs. Ass’n of the United States, Inc. v. State Farm Mutual Auto Ins. Co., 463 U.S. 29, 43 (1983).

But I’m not just looking to hit climate fraudsters in their wallets; if we play our political cards right, we must aim to put the ringleaders behind bars. To this end we need only apply the long-established American legal principle known as ‘spoliation of evidence’ to beat this fraud hands down.

As Stuart P. Green of Rutgers Law School, Newark, tells us in American Criminal Law Review, Vol. 42, 2005 there is a history of high profile accused individuals shown to have destroyed, concealed or tampered with evidence (e.g. climate data):

As a result, the person has been prosecuted for obstruction of justice, perjury, false statements, or other similar ‘cover-up’ crime. In some of the cases, such charges have accompanied charges for the underlying crime; in others, they have displaced them.

Green gives us two famous examples from both the American and British courts to illustrate his points. In the U.S. we need only go back to June 2002 and the Arthur Andersen accounting firm scandal. Here convictions were obtained for obstructing justice in connection with the destruction of tens of thousands of pages of documents related to the federal investigation of its client, Enron. At trial, Andersen had argued that, in destroying such documents, it had merely been carrying out its own, pre-existing, so-called document “retention” program.

While in the UK, Green points to July 2001 when British thriller writer and life peer Jeffrey Archer was convicted of perjury and perverting the course of justice in connection with a libel case he had initiated fourteen years earlier against the tabloid newspaper, the Daily Star, which had reported that Archer, then deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, had been seeing a prostitute. Archer was alleged to have perverted justice by asking a friend to give him a false alibi, and to have committed perjury by lying in an affidavit to the High Court and during testimony in the libel trial.

Pertinently, even though Professor Jones is a British climatologist employed at a UK university, he made this admission in the leaked CRU emails:

“I’m hoping that no-one there realizes I have a US DoE grant and have had this (with Tom W.) for the last 25 years.” [1120676865.txt ]

Thus Jones remains liable to extradition and may conceivably be convicted under both UK and US jurisdictions. To my mind, Professor Jones and his colleague, Professor Wei-Chyung Wang of the State University of New York at Albany may be most liable for fraudulent data handling in an influential 1990 paper in the journal ‘Nature’ that controversially concluded the urban heat island effect was ‘minimal,’ as reported in the excellent science blog, Watts up with that (WUWT).

Thereupon, from the leaked emails we may further establish a conspiratorial link from Jones to other climate crooks, including key American alarmist professor, Michael E. Mann, of Penn. State University. Mann’s data was officially exposed as junk in the Wegman Committee Report (2006).

Mann cooked up his tree-ring data to make the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) disappear and thus, without the MWP, recent warm temperatures appear more extraordinary than they actually are. Wegman condemned the work as being,

“sufficiently politicized that this [climate science] community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.”

Since ‘Wegman,’ Michael Mann appears to be fairly well lawyered up and primed to plead the Fifth Amendment if dragged before a criminal court. But in a civil court he’s onto a loser as his following ‘plea’ just won’t cut it:

“I have made available all of the research data that I am required to under United States policy as set by the National Science Foundation…. I maintain the right to decline to release any computer codes, which are my intellectual property…” – source

A jury will make up their own minds if Mann refuses to convince the court of his own due diligence and integrity.

But let us not forget, that apart from individual scientists, NASA, too has unlawfully stymied US freedom of information requests and hidden or destroyed their unethical data manipulations.

As Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) who only now has had his three-years-old Freedom of Information Act requests to NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) honored, says:

“This is a damning admission that NASA has been complicit in UN alarmism. This is not science. It is debunked advocacy.“ – source

Skeptic climate scientist, Roger Pielke Sr., among others, has accused top NASA GISS global warmist, James Hansen of misleading the public:

“The GISS news release is symptomatic of the continued attempt to ignore science issues in their data analysis which conflict with their statement in the press release.”

It is scientists such as Pielke who will be called to testify against what he argues are unethical, and perhaps criminal conduct. But as any attorney will tell you, the mere act of misrepresentation with the intention to secure a benefit, is fraud.

Spoliation of Evidence

The theory of the legal doctrine known as ‘spoliation’ is that when a party withholds, manipulates or destroys evidence, it may be reasonable to infer that the party had “consciousness of guilt” or other motivation to avoid the evidence.

In the United States under Federal and most State law spoliation has two consequences: first the act is criminal by statute and may result in fines and incarceration for the parties who engaged in the spoliation, secondly case law has established that proceedings which might have been altered by the spoliation may be interpreted under a ‘spoliation inference.’

The ‘spoliation inference’ is a negative evidentiary inference that a finder of fact can draw from a party’s destruction of a document or thing that is relevant to an ongoing or reasonably foreseeable civil or criminal proceeding, i.e. because Professor Jones admitted he destroyed, concealed or lost his climate data the finder of fact (judge/jury) can review all evidence uncovered in as strong a light as possible against the spoliator and in favor of the opposing party.

From my own experience, once any FOIA notice has been served the courts regard this as constituting notice that legal proceedings may be imminent so that any public official who thereinafter impedes, distorts or destroys such evidence may be found guilty of spoliation.

Thus, Jones, who confessed to destroying such evidence to willfully defy FOIA requests, would likely be convicted of fraud and jailed in a criminal court. But on the lower standards of quantum in a civil court, a jury only has to believe on the balance of probability that he and his co-conspirators intended to withhold, manipulate or destroy data to win a civil RICO lawsuit – a far more probable outcome.

While in other countries that operate an English common law-based judicial system such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand, litigants can implement legal remedies in my article such as mandamus petitions and judicial revue here.

Suffice to say, I’ll let ‘American Thinker’ have the final word about the climate Ponzi scheme’s most grotesque rogue, Al Gore:

Once it becomes clear to everyone that the AGW theory is based on cleverly manipulated data twisted by rigged computer models controlled by several dozen IPCC politicians/scientists, we can expect that investors who lose millions by investing in these companies will eventually haul Mr. Gore and the insider IPCC scientists into court.

Ranking Member on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) spoke to bloggers at The Heritage Foundation’s weekly Bloggers Briefing today. Watch the video and listen to his remarks on “Climategate” and the United Nations.

Discuss: here