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). But the job creation may not last due to Mann’s data creation. Mann is the stylist of the now famous “hockey stick” chart, which showed a dramatic spike in global temperatures. Let The Wall Street Journal explain its significance—from a 2005 article:

Just so we’re clear, this hockey stick isn’t a sports implement; it’s a scientific graph. Back in the late 1990s, American geoscientist Michael Mann published a chart that purported to show average surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere over the past 1,000 years. The chart showed relatively minor fluctuations in temperature over the first 900 years, then a sharp and continuous rise over the past century, giving it a hockey-stick shape.

Mr. Mann’s chart was both a scientific and political sensation. It contradicted a body of scientific work suggesting a warm period early in the second millennium, followed by a “Little Ice Age” starting in the 14th century. It also provided some visually arresting scientific support for the contention that fossil-fuel emissions were the cause of higher temperatures. Little wonder, then, that Mr. Mann’s hockey stick appears five times in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s landmark 2001 report on global warming, which paved the way to this week’s global ratification–sans the U.S., Australia and China–of the Kyoto Protocol.

The Journal notes that “there were doubts about Mr. Mann’s methods and analysis from the start,” but what’s clear from the emails released in the last 2 weeks is how far Mann and others went to mishandle the data. And that has some colleagues at Penn State calling for his ouster. Overall, Mann and his colleagues have at least $6 million in U.S. taxpayer money to answer for. But so far, as Telegraph columnist Gerald Warner points out, all Congress has done is summon the “consensual warmists” in the White House to spin why it all happened.