Pat Michaels: scientist, energy industry lackey, Washington Post contributor
http://mediamatters.org/items/200405200001Patrick J. Michaels is senior researcher in environmental studies at the Cato Institute; research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia; author of two books on global warming, The Satanic Gases and Sound and Fury: The Science and Politics of Global Warming; and editor of World Climate Report, a biweekly newsletter on climate studies funded in large part by the coal industry. According to a 1998 article by Institute for Public Accuracy executive director Noah Solomon, the Cato Institute has received financial support from energy companies -- including Chevron Companies, Exxon Company, Shell Oil Company, and Tenneco Gas, as well as the American Petroleum Institute, Amoco Foundation, and Atlantic Richfield Foundation. According to his bio on the Cato website, Michaels is a visiting scientist at the George C. Marshall Institute (GMI) in Washington, DC. The nonpartisan Congressional Quarterly calls the Marshall Institute "a Washington-based think tank supported by industry and conservative foundations that focuses primarily on trying to debunk global warming as a threat." According to an ExxonMobil report, the ExxonMobil Foundation donated $80,000 to the Marshall Institute's Global Climate Change Program in 2002.
Journalist Ross Gelbspan has also documented Michaels's more direct ties to the energy industry; in the December 1995 Harper's Magazine, Gelbspan wrote: "Michaels has received more than $115,000 over the last four years from coal and energy interests. World Climate Review, a quarterly he founded that routinely debunks climate concerns, was funded by Western Fuels". (World Climate Review's successor publication is World Climate Report, and the latter is also funded by the energy industry). All these companies have a financial stake in opposing policies that seek to combat global warming by limiting carbon emissions.
Michaels is part of a small and dwindling cadre of scientists who remain skeptical about the effect of human activities on global warming and the seriousness of the potential impact. An article from the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security -- a liberal-leaning policy and research institute -- recounted a 2003 incident in which Michaels threatened to sue a fellow scientist Peter Gleick, after Gleick told The Star Press of Muncie, Indiana, that Michaels "is one of a very small minority of nay-sayers who continue to dispute the facts and science about climate change in the face of compelling, overwhelming, and growing evidence. ... I consider that Michaels is to the science of climate change like the Flat Earth Society is to the science of planetary shape." The Pacific Institute article also quoted Harvard University professor John Holdren, who told the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee, "Michaels is another of the handful of U.S. climate-change contrarians, but lacks Richard Lindzen's scientific stature. He has published little if anything of distinction in the professional literature, being noted rather for his shrill op-ed pieces and indiscriminate denunciations of virtually every finding of mainstream climate science."
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