“..Patrick Michaels has more credibility than your average climate skeptic.
Unlike some of the kookier characters that populate the small world of climate denialists—like Lord Christopher Monckton, a sometime adviser to Margaret Thatcher who claims that “We are a carbon-starved planet,” ..
.. or H. Leighton Steward, a retired oil executive and author of a best-selling diet book who argues that carbon dioxide is “green”—
- Michaels is actually a bona fide climate scientist.
As such, he’s often quoted by reporters as a reasonable expert .. who argues that global warming has been overhyped.
But what Michaels doesn’t mention in his frequent media appearances .. is his history of receiving money from big polluters.
Michaels, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, has some impressive-sounding credentials.
He has a PhD in ecological climatology and is a senior fellow in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University.
He’s a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists ..
.. and a former program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society.
He regularly touts his work as a contributing author and reviewer of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports.
(Almost every climate scientist in the world has at some point contributed to or reviewed an IPCC study.)
Unlike climate skeptics who implausibly claim that there’s no such thing as global warming ..
.. Michaels accepts that it’s happening, but downplays the severity of the problem .. and the role that human activity plays in the phenomenon.
With climate science increasingly under siege, Michaels has been getting plenty of airtime lately.
Following reports of errors and sloppy research procedures with the reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Michaels featured prominently in a CBS News report last month ..
.. claiming that there is “no doubt the trust in the UN panel has been undermined.”
And after hacked emails revealed that a group of climate scientists had tried to block skeptical views from academic papers and journals, Michaels appeared on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 to debate Bill Nye (the “Science Guy”).
Michaels said he was “troubled” that scientists at the heart of the controversy might have tried “to hide things” from Freedom of Information Act requests.
He was also featured prominently in a New York Times piece calling the controversy “a mushroom cloud” for climate science ..
.. and appeared several times in the Wall Street Journal complaining that scientists said mean things about him in the emails.
(It’s worth emphasizing that while the incident revealed scientists behaving unprofessionally, nothing in the emails undermined the underlying science of climate change.)
But Michaels’ credibility on climate is called into question by a trove of documents from a 2007 court case .. that attracted almost no scrutiny at the time.
Those documents show that Michaels has financial ties to big energy interests—
- ties that he’s worked hard to keep secret.
Here’s the back story:..”
go to source/story>>Most Credible Climate Skeptic Not So Credible After All | Mother Jones
