patmichaels
tlambert | January 16, 2012Pat Michaels is infamous for his fraudulent graph presented to Congress in 1998. Dana Nuccitelli at Skeptical Science details some more fraudulent graphs from Michaels.
tlambert | August 5, 2009Australia's CIS (Centre for Independent Studies) has been promoting greenhouse denial and delay for a decade. Last year their "Big Ideas" forum featured some classic denialism from Arthur Herman. This year, on Monday 10 August in Sydney we have:
Enemies of Progress?
Cute title. Maybe I should have used "Enemies of Science?" as the title of this post.
Where humanity once solved the world's problems, we are now viewed as the source. We no longer take pride in dynamic progress to benefit mankind; we bemoan the so-called carbon footprint that this progress will leave.
What? "so-called carbon…
tlambert | May 27, 2009John Quiggin categorizes those that reject climate science into Tribalists, Ideologists, Hacks and sufferers of Emeritus disease.
Speaking of hacks, Bob Burton has discovered some more about Pat Michaels funding:
[New Hope Environmental Services], which he wholly owns, describes itself as "an advocacy science consulting firm." These days, New Hope's main activities are publishing the firm's blog, World Climate Report, and helping anonymous clients to publicize "findings on climate change and scientific and social perspectives that may not otherwise appear in the popular literature or media."…
tlambert | March 16, 2009Allow me to shorten Heartland's 2009 International Conference on Climate Change for you.
Joseph L. Bast: Bray's survey shows that there is no consensus.
Vaclav Klaus: Environmentalists have a secret plan to "return mankind centuries back".
Richard Lindzen: It is an error to say "It's the sun!"
Tom McClintock: Al Gore is fat. And, it's the sun!
Lawrence Solomon: Environmental organizations are pawns of the foundations that fund them.
Tom Segalstad: Total human emissions of CO2 are twice the alleged increase in atmospheric CO2, therefore human emissions cannot be the cause of the increase.
Syun…
tlambert | September 29, 2007Robert McClure reports:
Now the Society of Environmental Journalists' Watchdog Tipsheet has just revealed that Michaels withdrew as an expert witness in a recently decided landmark court case in which automakers sought to turn back state efforts to rein in cars' production of greenhouse gasses.
Michaels said he would testify only if his funders' identities could be kept secret, court documents show. Later, when Greenpeace intervened in the case specifically to pry loose that list, Michaels complained that his consulting firm, New Hope Environmental Services Inc. would suffer.
Because fossil…
tlambert | January 26, 2007Earlier I wrote about Khilyuk and Chilingar
their mistake is so large and so obvious that anyone who cites them either has no clue about climate science or doesn't care whether what they write is true or not.
So who has discredited themselves by citing them?
Robert M. Carter, C. R. de Freitas, Indur M. Goklany, David Holland and Richard S. Lindzen
Ron Bailey
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
Andrew Bolt
Tim Blair
The Idsos
Pat Michaels
Pat Michaels went way beyond merely citing them, writing over a thousand words about how it was peer-reviewed and how the authors were from USC and how it…
tlambert | August 22, 2006The buck passing continues in the case of Pat Michaels and the office of Virginia State Climatologist. The State of Virginia has passed it back to UVa. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports:
Katherine K. Hanley, the secretary of the commonwealth, wrote University of Virginia President John T. Casteen III on Thursday, asking that Michaels "avoid any conflict of interest or appearance thereof by scrupulously avoiding the use of the title of state climatologist in connection with any outside activities or private consulting endeavors." ...
Hanley's letter also addressed the question of whether…
tlambert | August 15, 2006Kevin Lynch has interesting pair of posts investigating Pat Michaels. First, it looks like Michaels isn't really Virginia's State Climatologist. Second, Michaels has serious conflict of interest, not just because the State of Virginia and fossil fuel companies have conflicting interests, but because he's been misusing State Climate Advisories to attack the science of climate change.
Thanks to David Sewell for the links.
tlambert | August 2, 2006Notorious fraud Pat Michaels is in the news some more.
First, Coby Beck reports that California as part of discovery in lawsuit involving automobile companies and global warming wants:
All DOCUMENTS relating to both GLOBAL WARMING and to any of the following individuals: S. Fred Singer, James Glassman, David Legates, Richard Lindzen, Patrick J. Michaels, Thomas Gale Moore, Robert C. Balling, Jr., Sherwood B. Idso, Craig D. Idso, Keith E. Idso, Sallie Baliunas, Paul Reiter, Chris Homer [sic], Ross McKitrick, Julian Morris, Frederick Seitz, Willie Soon, and Steven Milloy, including but not…
tlambert | July 28, 2006A leaked memo from the Intermountain Rural Electric Association (IREA) gives us inside view of how some of the Global Warming disinformation campaign is financed. There's this:
We decided to support Dr. Patrick Michaels. ... In February of this year, IREA alone contributed $100,000 to Dr. Michaels. In addition, we have contacted all the G&T's in the United States ... and obtained additional contributions and pledges for Dr. Michaels' group. We will be following up the remaining G&T's over the next several weeks.
and this, on the ludicrous CEI ads:
[CEI] has been running two ads in…
tlambert | June 5, 2006In Paul Krugman's May 29 column he wrote about Pat Michael's "fraud, pure and simple" that James Hansen's 1988 prediction of global warming was too high by 300%. (Michael's fraud was described earlier by Hansen, Gavin Schmidt, Hansen again and me.)
Michaels has posted a denial, so I'm going to go back to the original sources so that everyone can see what Michaels did.
In Michaels' 1998 testimony he stated:
Ten years ago, on June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified before the House of Representatives that there was a strong "cause and effect relationship" between observed…
tlambert | June 1, 2006Hansen's 1988 paper that Pat Michaels misrepresented in testimony is not available online. I've put some extracts here.
Hansen, J., I. Fung, A. Lacis, D. Rind, Lebedeff, R. Ruedy, G. Russell, and P. Stone 1988. Global climate changes as forecast by Goddard Institute for Space Studies three-dimensional model. J. Geophys. Res. 93, 9341-9364.
Abstract
We use a three-dimensional climate model, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) model II with 8° by 10° horizontal resolution, to simulate the global climate effects of time-dependent variations of atmospheric trace gases and aerosols.…
tlambert | May 20, 2006Media Matters catches Pat Michaels in an outrageous bit of quote mining:
MICHAELS: Well, it's an exaggeration. Global warming is a very real thing. People have something to do with it in the last several decades of the 20th century. But what people do on this issue is they exaggerate it. I have a quote from [Gore], from Grist magazine recently.
He said, "I believe it's appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is."
HANNITY: Yeah.
MICHAELS: He says it's appropriate to over-represent the danger on this issue. You have to realize what he said and…
tlambert | April 8, 2006
Six Australian business leader reckon that the debate is over and climate change is real:
Six business leaders yesterday stepped into the greenhouse debate, and blew the whistle. Game over, they said: climate change is real, it's going to hurt, and unless we act now, it's going to hurt us a lot.
These guys know how to play the game. Westpac's CEO David Morgan is a former Treasury official, married to former Labor minister Ros Kelly. They weren't going to criticise John Howard over his handling of climate change; he doesn't like criticism. They just urged him to shift ground, and fast.…
tlambert | February 15, 2006
Pat Michaels is notorious for lying about the predictions that James Hansen made in testimony before Congress in 1988. In his paper Hansen showed the results of three possible scenarios, but in his testimony before congress Hansen only showed emphasised the results of the most likely one, scenario B. As the graph here shows, scenario B turned out to be a very good prediction. However, in 1998 Michaels published a blatant lie about Hansen, erasing B and C and claiming that scenario A was his prediction.
Believe it or not, Michaels is
doing it again
[Hansen] distorted in front of the U.S.…
tlambert | January 17, 2006Pat Michaels says that Kyoto would destroy the US economy:
In a nutshell, that's why the European governments are so exercised about Bush's "no" to Kyoto. They see it as an international instrument that would destroy the economy of their major competitor, even as they know it doesn't do a thing about global temperature. These facts are evident.
James Lovelock says global warming will make most of the planet uninhabitable
We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will…
tlambert | January 17, 2006Pat Michaels has responded
to my post pointing out several errors in his post about frog extinctions:
It has subsequently been pointed out to us that the points on our Figure 1 (Pounds et al. Figure 4c) are not actually amphibian populations but simply a sampling of weather stations in the regions studied by Pounds et al.
It seems that Michaels could not bring himself to mention my name or link to my correction. (Nor do they accept trackbacks.)
Michaels comes with a different way of calculating the percentage of species that could become extinct because of the change in temperatures:
we…
tlambert | January 15, 2006Carl Zimmer has a useful summary of the recent Nature paper that links global warming with frog extinctions. Brian Schmidt comments:
I was curious about the fact that none of the climate-focused bloggers on my blog roll had written on the subject. Then it occurred to me - they're climatologists, not biologists, so they decided not to write about something outside of their expertise.
Pat Michaels wasn't bothered by this. In fact, he reckons that he's demolished the paper:
I have to say that this was the easiest shoot-down in some time,
because, in my humble opinion, it was the worst paper…
tlambert | October 4, 2004 Readers may remember Pat Michaels, who authored a paper one that "disproved" global warming by deliberately removing almost one-third of the satellite data from his analysis and co-operated with Ross McKitrick on another paper that managed to "prove" that global warming wasn't happening by mixing up degrees with radians. Alan Anderson has responded to my criticism of his claim that Kyoto was a dastardly EU plot to cripple the US economy by offering up an article by ... Pat Michaels.
I'm afraid that this article is up to Michael's usual standards. He constructs a measure of carbon…
tlambert | August 16, 2004 In my previous post I commented on the various responses of sceptics now that both that satellite and surface record show global warming is happening. (The map below shows the global warming trend for the troposphere from the satellite record.) Scott Church left a comment giving a detailed explanation of the satellite data. He concluded:
"Thus, the real lower to middle troposphere trend appears to be around +0.10 to +0.13 deg K/decade uncorrected for stratospheric cooling, and +0.18 to 0.21 deg K/decade with this accounted for---exactly as predicted by…