The danger all along would be that, even in the face of the incriminating emails and code, the CRU conspirators would hold together and come up with a common story. By being consistently brazen, they might have been able to stall an unwilling officialdom and at least muddy the issue enough to get away with some token reproaches for sloppy work.
But the implied destruction of Freedom of Information Act materials changes the game. This is a criminal matter, and tenure won’t protect faculty who countenance such behavior. Professor Michael Mann works for Penn State, a land-grant university that receives considerable government funding. That makes him particularly vulnerable. In times of tight budgets, it only takes a couple of enterprising legislators to force embarrassing testimony from university officials on why their employees are flouting transparency laws.
Again, the crime isn’t the issue – it’s the coverup. The public remains divided about global warming, but there is complete unanimity in favor of obeying FOIA requirements.
Right now, in college campuses across the country (and perhaps the world), university presidents are looking with apprehension at their climate studies departments and wondering if they will be called to testify at the next state budget hearing about FOIA compliance.
As sure as the sun rises, you can bet that more than a few Republican state legislators are salivating at the opportunity to make liberal professors sweat at the next Higher Education Appropriations Subcommittee hearing.
Excrement, as the saying goes, rolls down hill. Thus the presidents are contacting department chairs, demanding to know the full story. The chairs in turn are pushing their underlings to come clean. As anyone with even a passing knowledge of faculty politics knows, there are plenty of factions who would be eager to snap up funding/facilities/prime office space, and they need little encouragement to turn up the heat on their rivals.
These rivalries extend through all of academia, and one can rest assured that the case is being built that University A, which is implicated, should be punished by having its money taken away and given to smaller University B, which is untainted and would do oh so much better.
Adding to the mix is the fact that NASA is now facing a FOIA lawsuit – and unpleasant questions may surface there as well. The fact is, there is nothing in FOIA that would exempt climate research materials – you can’t even claim that it would endanger patents.
The pressure to turn “state’s evidence” is therefore enormous. Watch for more academics to claim that they were intemperate, perhaps a little mean-spirited, but it was the other guy who totally broke the law.

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