Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore over the weekend called for Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to end his baseless witch hunt against climate scientist Michael Mann. 

Ignoring the fact that the University of Pennsylvania completely exonerated Professor Mann of any wrongdoing in the wake of the mythical “Climategate” media frenzy, Cuccinelli vows to continue his political attacks on Mann and the whole of climate science. 

In a blog post featured on Huffington Post over the weekend, Gore calls Cuccinelli’s attempts to subpoena ten years’ worth of Michael Mann’s documents “an assault on academic freedom” and “an affront to the scientific process.”

“It is time for Cuccinelli to end his witch-hunt,” Gore concludes.

Gore’s post naturally generated plenty of interest among trolls and conspiracy theorists, who immediately launched into ad hominem attacks on Gore, lauded denier ‘experts’ like Christopher Monckton (the non-scientist with a penchant for trampling Godwin’s Law), and almost entirely avoided the subject of Gore’s piece – Ken Cuccinelli. 

Why focus on the politicization of science when you can sit around dreaming up conspiracy theories about Al Gore and the U.N.?