Penn State University professor Michael Mann, creator of the infamous hockey stick curve and one of the climate scientists under attack in Climategate, is not only warning people of catastrophic global warming, but he’s using tax dollars to stimulate the economy at the same time:

“Climategate scientist Michael Mann received a $541,000 National Science Foundation grant under the stimulus bill passed by Congress in February. According to the government’s transparency website on stimulus spending, the grant has generated 1.62 jobs and is less than 50 percent complete (that’s $334,000 per job).”

Increased skepticism is evolving into full-fledged investigation. Mann is currently under investigation by Penn State University. Our friends at The Commonwealth Foundation in Pennsylvania have more on this.

Phil Jones, the head scientist at University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (the organization where the leaked emails came from) stepped down. The evolution of Climategate occurred well before the $541,000 grant took effect. But it does show how profoundly wasteful the stimulus spending has been as well as something P Diddy has been saying for years: It’s all about the Benjamins:

“Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he’d been awarded in the 1990s. Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?”

And it doesn’t stop at global warming research, you can follow money when it comes to energy investments. John Broder’s piece in the The New York Times details how Al Gore’s financial profit is tied to his global warming alarmism and push for renewable energy. Gore’s venture capital firm invested in Silver Spring Networks, a company that makes hardware and software to improve efficiency in the nation’s electricity grid.