Patrick J. Michaels

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Patrick J. Michaels

Patrick J. Michaels (born February 15, 1950 ) is an American agricultural climatologist. He is Emeritus in Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia and was a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute until 2019 . He is one of the few climate deniers who can demonstrate real expertise in climate research in relation to their academic training . At the same time he is considered to be one of the most active climate "skeptical" scientists (contrarians) who deny man-made climate change .

Live and act

Michaels was President of the American Association of State Climatologists and chaired the Applied Climatology Committee of the American Meteorological Society . He is a former co-author and reviewer of the expert reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change . Michaels studied biology and plant ecology at the University of Chicago and received his PhD in ecological climatology from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 1979 .

In addition to scientific publications, he has published a number of popular science books on the subject and is regularly featured in the American mass media. The World Climate Report , which he co-authored , is published by the Greening Earth Society , a climate denial organization founded by the Western Fuels Association , the coal producers' association . He was also one of the scientific speakers for the Information Council on the Environment , another climate denial organization launched by the coal industry, whose central goal was to reinterpret global warming from fact to mere theory. For the ICE, he appeared on TV and radio programs, among other things, and suggested to the audience that no one knew whether global warming was a problem. Michaels is also a member of the CO2 Coalition , a u. a. Climate denial organization funded by coal giant Peabody Energy that claims people should release more of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

In the 1990s he also served on the advisory board of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), an astroturfing organization founded by the tobacco company Philip Morris , whose main goal was to combat the health dangers of passive smoking . He denied the scientific knowledge that the ozone hole was caused by the use of CFCs until at least the year 2000 and instead blamed volcanoes for the observed decrease in ozone.

Michaels has been receiving research funding from the fossil energy industry in the five to six-figure range since the mid-1990s at the latest and has often acted as the mouthpiece of the coal industry . There are also financial links to the oil industry: According to the company, the proportion of research funding that came from the oil industry in the past made up around 40% of its total research funding. Michaels have also been shown to have ties to at least 11 ExxonMobil- funded organizations, including the Cato Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow , the Competitive Enterprise Institute , the George C. Marshall Institute, and the Heartland Institute .

According to critics, " climate skepticism " has become "a thoroughly lucrative business" for Michaels. Among other things, he received $ 100,000 from the Intermountain Rural Electric Association to downplay the human contribution to global warming and to confuse the public about their understanding of man-made global warming. Another of his studies was co-financed with 98,000 dollars from the General Association of German Coal Mining .

In 1998 Michaels attacked climate researcher James E. Hansen while giving a testimony before the US Congress . Here Michaels relied on the technique of cherry picking . In 1988, when he gave a testimony to the US Congress, Hansen created three different projections for global temperature developments, each based on different assumptions for global carbon dioxide emissions. One emissions scenario was based on exponential growth in emissions, one on a business-as-usual scenario and one based on a complete emission stop in 2000. Ten years later, Michaels cited only the most extreme of Hansen's projections, ignoring the other two completely, then claiming that Hansen was 300% wrong. In fact, Hansen only used the mean emissions scenario in his speech, which came very close to the actual temperature development. He criticized the introduction of an emissions trading system for greenhouse gases aimed at by the then US President Obama as "Obamunism".

Publications (excerpt)

Publications

Books

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Naomi Oreskes , Erik M. Conway , The Machiavellis of Science. The network of denial. Wiley-VCH, Weinheim 2014, p. 165.
  2. ^ Scott Waldman: US think tank shuts down prominent center that challenged climate science. In: Science - E&E News. May 29, 2019, accessed June 9, 2019 .
  3. ^ Riley E. Dunlap, Aaron M. McCright: Organized Climate Change Denial , in: John S. Dryzek, Richard B. Norgaard, David Schlosberg (Eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society . Oxford University Press 2011, pp. 144-160, esp. 151.
  4. ↑ Aaron McCright, Dealing with climate change contrarians , in: Susanne C. Moser, Lisa Dilling (ed.) Creating a Climate for Change. Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change . Cambridge University Press 2007, 200–212, p. 200 and especially footnote 2.
  5. ↑ http://www.cato.org/people/patrick-michaels
  6. ^ Richard Caputo, Frank Kreith: "Hitting the wall: a vision of a secure energy future (Synthesis Lectures on Energy and the Environment: Technology, Science, and Society) . Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2009, ISBN 1598293346 , p. 216.
  7. ↑ Naomi Oreskes : My facts are better than your facts , in: Peter Howlett, Mary S. Morgan (Eds.), How Well Do Facts Travel? The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge . Cambridge University Press 2011, 136–166, especially p. 142.
  8. ↑ CO2 Coalition About . CO 2 Coalition website . Retrieved September 19, 2019.
  9. ↑ James Lawrence Powell: The Inquisition of Climate Science. New York 2012, p. 56.
  10. ↑ James Hoggan, Richard Littlemore: Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming . Greystone Books 2009, pp. 105f.
  11. ↑ US Senators detail a climate science "web of denial" but the impacts go well beyond their borders . In: The Guardian , July 12, 2016. Retrieved July 12, 2016.
  12. ^ Union of Concerned Scientists : Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air. How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco's Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science . January 2007, accessed July 14, 2019.
  13. ^ A b Cordula Meyer: Lobbyists: Science as Enemy , in: Spiegel Online , October 4, 2010
  14. ↑ Maxwell T. Boykoff: Public Enemy No. 1? Understanding Media Representations of Outlier Views on Climate Change . In: American Behavioral Scientist . tape 57 , no. 6 , 2013, p. 796- 817 , doi : 10.1177 / 0002764213476846 .
  15. ↑ James Lawrence Powell: The Inquisition of Climate Science . New York 2012, pp. 80f and 171f.
  16. ↑ Naomi Oreskes , Erik M. Conway , The Machiavellis of Science. The network of denial. Wiley-VCH, Weinheim 2014, p. 322f.
personal data
SURNAME Michaels, Patrick J.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American climatologist, publicist and political advisor
DATE OF BIRTH February 15, 1950