Is this the jump-the-shark moment for the climate alarmists?

Here's the situation:

Jagadish Shukla is the head of the Climate Dynamcs department at George Mason University.

He's also the lead signatory to a letter to the Most Equal Comrade and the Attorney General asking them to use RICO laws to investigate "corporations and other organizations that have deceived the American public about the risks of climate change."

Shukla also heads a non-profit outfit called the Institute of Global Environment and Society.

His wife and daughter are also offers of IGES.  The three of them have drawn six-figure salaries from the Institute since 2001.

IGES has received $63 million in federal (taxpayer) grants since 2001, with little in the way of published research to show for it.

Lamar Smith (R-TX) of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technoloogy has written Dr. Shukla a letter requesting the release of all documents pertaining to his IGES activities.

What it all adds up to:

Under federal law, state employees may not be remunerated for doing work which falls under their state employee remit. As a Professor at GMU, Shukla is definitely an employee of the state. And the work for which he has most lavishly been rewarding himself at IGES appears to be remarkably similar to the work he does at GMU as professor of climate dynamics.

If GMU was aware of these extra-curricular payments, then it was in breach of its own policy on “financial conflicts of interest in federally funded research.”

If it wasn’t aware of them, then, Shukla legally may be required to send half of that $63 million in federal grants to his employer, GMU.

For many readers, though, perhaps the biggest take-home message of this extraordinary story is: Who do these climate alarmists think they are?

I'm never inclined to leap to charges of corruption and hypocrisy as the main problem with leftist machinations, because those are traits that fallible human beings of any stripe can exhibit. Plus, the ground-level climate activists seem to be mostly true believers who really do go in for the mad prescriptions for our species' way of life. But I think there's no denying that the big shots of the movement are in it for the gravy. At least it's a significant component of their motivation.

And often, as in the case of Dr. Shukla, they wind up getting reckless and exposing their entire fraudulent facade.