Patrick Michaels
Patrick Michaels is a Cato Institute scholar who asserts that global warming is a ‘myth’.[1] Michaels bases his opinion on evidence from the work of Noah Keenlyside and his team from the Leipzig Institute of Marine Science. According to their paper, the Earth’s oceans have a natural variability which will ‘temporarily offset’ global warming from carbon dioxide.[1] The argument is that the Earth’s surface is 70% oceanic, therefore significantly influences global temperature, this means that ‘Both Atlantic and Pacific temperatures can get “stuck” for a decade or longer, in relatively warm or cool patterns.’[1] Michaels also criticises legislative efforts to control climate change, stating, ‘Science no longer provides justification for any rush to pass drastic global warming legislation’.[1]
Michaels described the Climate Security Act, which aimed to cut emissions of carbon dioxide by 66% over the next 42 years, sponsored by Joe Lieberman and John Warner as ‘impossible to achieve’, and he called the Interior Department’s intent on naming the polar bear an endangered species as a ‘political stunt’ because they were, according to Michaels, near record-high population levels.[1]
Contents
Funding
A leaked memo from the Intermountain Rural Electric Association shows that they paid Michaels $100,000 in February 2006.
Criticism
Michaels was accused of altering the evidence James Hansen gave for his Congressional testimony on global warming in June 1988. <refname=Logical Science>Patrick J. Michaels, Patrick J. Michaels - Logical Science, Logical Science, accessed 15.11.10 </ref>.
Hansen said he was highly confident in the arrival of a long-term warming trend, due to the greenhouse effect. He provided a graph which outlined three scenarios, based on different levels of CO2 output. These scenarios were shown to demonstrate the wide range of possibilities of how CO2 forcings would develop, as it is too difficult to gauge how much coal humans will potentially burn.<refname=Logical Science> 10 years later, Hansen updated the graph with the most recent measurements made of temperature, and it was found that his predictions from the original graph were very accurate. (Graph also provided here).<refname=Logical Science/> Patrick Michaels also testified in front of Congress, using Hansen’s graph, however he had erased the scenarios B and C, which were considered the two most accurate scenarios.<refname=Logical Science/>
External Resources
- Union of Concerned Scientists, Scientists' Report Documents ExxonMobil’s Tobacco-like Disinformation Campaign on Global Warming Science , 3 January 2007.
