My previous post regarding Patrick Michaels has been getting so many views, I feel compelled to add a few article
Please do link to
SkepticalScience.com to read the details.
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Patrick Michaels: Serial Deleter of Inconvenient Data
Posted on 17 January 2012 by dana1981
Patrick Michaels is a research fellow at the Cato Institute think tank, the chief editor of the website World Climate Report, has been given a climate blog at the business magazineForbes, and his articles are frequently re-posted at climate "skeptic" blogs like Watts Up With That (WUWT). Despite his clear conflict of interest (Michaels has estimated that 40% of his work is funded by the petroleum industry), many people continue to rely on him as a reliable source of climate information. This is an unwise choice, because Michaels also has a long history of badly distorting climate scientists' work. In fact, not only does Michaels misrepresent climate research on a regular basis, but on several occasions he has gone as far as to manipulate other scientists' figures by deleting parts he doesn't like.
Patrick Michaels is a serial deleter of inconvenient data:
Hansen 1988 . . .
Schmittner 2011 . . .
Gillett 2012 . . .
Deleters and Enablers
In every case discussed above, Michaels has deleted the data which contradict his constant arguments that the planet will warm less than most climate scientists expect, and thus that global warming is nothing to worry about. Given his history as a serial data deleter, rather than being given so many platforms from which to spread his misinformation, Patrick Michaels (and certainly the World Climate Report website) should be considered an unreliable source of information.
This is a problematic situation. There are a large number of people who simply don't want to accept the scientific reality that humans are causing rapid global warming. However, this reality is accepted by the vast majority of scientific experts, because it is supported by the preponderance of scientific data. Denial enablers like Anthony Watts, Forbes, and other media outlets have found a way around the first problem by giving fake skeptics like Patrick Michaels a platform to speak to those who are in denial about the science. Patrick Michaels has found a way around the second problem by simply deleting the data which is inconvenient for his narrative, only presenting his audience with the bits of evidence which seem to support their denial, as long as the inconvenient data are ignored.
Link to the complete article:
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Patrick Michaels' 1992 claims versus the 2012 reality
Posted on 23 August 2012 by MarkR
1990: Nelson Mandela is released from prison, the reunification of Germany is agreed and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) releases its first scientific report on global warming. Two years later the
climate skeptic Dr. Patrick Michaels published
an opinion article in Aeronautics America explaining why he thought that global warming wasn't a problem.
20 years later we can see how science has moved on in the areas that a 1990s skeptic thought were important. We’ll look at what the IPCC said in 1990, then Michaels’ own words from the 1992 article, and provide a quick summary of what happened afterwards. Snazzy, coloured boxes contain everything you need to know, but if you're desperate for detail then they are followed by extra comments and graphs to provide background.
Part one: how much global warming do you get from CO2?
IPCC 1990: "models show a significant equilibrium increase in global average surface temperature due to a doubling of CO2 which ranges from 1.9 to 5.2°C...Most results lie between 3.5 and 4 C...[including other evidence] a value of 2.5°C is considered to be the best guess in the light of current knowledge."
Patrick Michaels, 1992: "The mid-1980s’ General Circulation Models (GCMs) forclimate change stated, in aggregate, that the planet would warm up some 4.2 C due to doubling of the natural CO2 greenhouse effect"
Today: Many lines of evidence including tests using real world measurements suggest that the '
climate sensitivity', the amount that Earth will warm up because of a doubling of atmospheric
CO2, is 2-4.5 C with a best estimate of 3 C (5.4 F). This best estimate is slightly higher than it was in the 1990s (
Knutti and Hegerl, 2008;
IPCC, 2007).
Part two: bipolar disorder to warming? South warms up, north warms more . . .
Part three: warming happens both at night and during the day . . .
Part four: ice is melting . . .
Part five: seas are rising . . .
Part six: satellites measure global warming . . .
Part seven: some air pollution blocks sunlight and slows down global warming . . .
Conclusions
{...}
"We have 20 years of data to compare what happened with Michaels' 1992 calls for caution. He suggested Greenland wouldn't melt, but it is. He suggested daytime temperatures wouldn't rise, but they are. He suggested concerns about sea level rise would vanish, but the seas are rising faster. He said that satellites didn't show global warming, but now they do. He critiqued models because they expected more warming over the Northern Hemisphere and he didn't see it, but that's exactly what happened."
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Link to the complete article:
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Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Megan McArdle, senior editor for The Atlantic, has made the most jaw-dropping admission on climate I’ve seen in years from a journalist. It deserves attention because it unintentionally illuminates why the “status quo” establishment media’s coverage of global warming is so fatally useless.
In explaining why she (supposedly) doesn’t post a lot on the problem of global warming, McArdle
writes:
The first reason I don’t post a lot is that I’m not an expert, and I’m not planning to become one. I’ve basically outsourced my opinion on the science to people like Jonathan Adler, Ron Bailey, and Pat Michaels of Cato–all of whom concede that anthropogenic global warming is real, though they may contest the likely extent, or desired remedies.
To paraphrase my mother (and countless others): Megan, if Pat Michaels told you to jump off a cliff, would you? Because that is certainly what he wants humanity to do.
I’ll come back to the fact that the Cato Institute, originally the Charles Koch Foundation, is in the process of being
officially taken back by the Kochs — and McCardle, in the disclaimer at the end of the piece, notes, the current Charles Koch Foundation “sponsored a journalism fellowship for my husband.” Such is the nature of modern-day “journalism.”
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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. . . .
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: . . .
And therein lies a tale, link to the full story:
