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Michaels, Pat

frontline $ did not sway,having a blast

bak

capt 917

see sidekick balling

see TURNING PT FORK DECISION

rich losing earth?

Sununu was more interested in those who rejected the emerging climate science, including a number of researchers who have continued to battle against consensus science today. Some of them, includingPat Michaels of the Cato Institute,continue to have influence in the Trump administration and have encouraged the rollback of climate protections

lancaster revelle, zuck

~ Mann hockey stick, ~ Hansen, models

covid BS

Cato shut its sci shop (lindzen)

one of few hacks w/ legit creds, but gov asked him to stop calling himself delaware state climatologist?

pal of Happer both acsh, w/ singer

Business-Managed Environment

Denial Scientists - Robert Balling

  :{»:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: Associations

  :{»:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: Corporate Funding

  :{»:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: Links

Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. He is a contributing editor for the denial journal, World Climate Report, originally funded by Western Fuels Association and now published by Patrick Michael's firm New Hope Environmental Services.

Balling's books include:

Balling admits that human emitted carbon dioxide can have a warming effect but claims that this is not a problem. In 2004 Balling told Business Week that he believed that in the future people would be able to engineer whatever climate they wanted. In 2006 in an article 'Give a Hoot, Don't (Call It) "Pollute"', he argued that carbon dioxide was not a polllutant:

There is no doubt that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and holding everything else constant, elevated CO2 will act to warm the Earth. But as we see in the CO2 story, the levels of this gas have fluctuated enormously over the history of the Earth, and the ecosystems of the planet have evolved to cope with these variations. To suddenly label CO2 as a "pollutant" is a disservice to a gas that has played an enormous role in the development and sustainability of all life on this wonderful Earth.

Associations

Balling has been an advisor for a number of corporate-funded think tanks and front groups such as the Greening Earth Society and the Information Council on the Environment (see table below and diagram). He is also a senior fellow at the Goldwater Institute, a think tank "committed to expanding free enterprise and liberty", based in Arizona.

Affiliation With ExxonMobil-Funded OrganizationsTitle/Role
Cato InstituteBook Author
Committee for a Constructive TomorrowScientific Advisory Board Member
Competitive Enterprise InstituteReport Author
George C. Marshall InstituteRoundtable Speaker
Heartland InstituteGlobal Warming Expert
Heritage FoundationPolicy Expert
Hoover InstitutionRobert Wesson Endowment Fund Fellow (1993-4)
Tech Central StationScience Round Table Member

Source: Seth Shulman et. al., 'Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science'. Union of Concerned Scientists, January 2007, p. 34.; 'Roundtable Speakers', George C. Marshall Institute, 2010; Global Warming Experts', Heartland Institute, 2010.

Corporate Funding

Balling has been heavily funded by fossil fuel interests. In the 1990s he was reported in The Arizona Republic as saying that he had “received more like $700,000 over the past five years” from coal and oil interests in Great Britain, Germany and the US in the previous six years.

Links

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/10/24/2130859/-Google-s-Selling-Climate-Disinfo-Ads-Despite-Policy-Against-It-YouTube-Too-Still

Google's Selling Climate Disinfo Ads, Despite Policy Against It. YouTube, Too. Still.

Daily Kos

Hate speech test case Mark Steyn interviewing pro-J6-insurrection Marc Morano and debunked-by-deniers Monckton about their recent invitation to be ...

...In October of 2021, Google announced that it was banning climate disinformation from its advertising system, including on YouTube. That (should have) meant videos denying the scientific reality that fossil fuels are causing climate change shouldn't have ads on them, and websites that publish such false claims would also be barred from using Google's ad services.

In October of 2022, it's still all too easy to find climate disinformation on YouTube that's selling ads. 

FoxNews clips that get fact checked? Still monetized. UK's version of Fox, GBNews, having a PR exec turned professional denier on to say the "'UK Government has been taken over by sleeper agents"? Making ad money.Hate speech test case Mark Steyn interviewing pro-J6-insurrection Marc Morano and debunked-by-deniers Monckton about their recent invitation to be a laughing stock? Monetized! Amateur that depends on professionals Tom Nelson's podcast videos, Alex Epstein on Glenn Beck, John Stossel tapping deceased denier Pat Michaelsto deny hurricane science, and our favorite, the canonically bad climate denial video, the Great Global Warming Swindle, that Avaaz called out in 2020, are all monetized.

And that's just on YouTube! There's also Google's sprawling advertising display business. Google gets paid to place ads on websites across the internet. Its policy against climate disinformation should mean that it doesn't place ads on websites that publish climate disinformation. And the company should care about that, because big name advertisers are very clear about not wanting their products to appear next to the casual bigotry, hatred and lies found on websites that carry climate disinformation.

But apparently a year is still not enough time for Google to actually enforce its demonetization policy, because a new report from Dewey Square Group found Google "is by far the most significant advertising supplier on websites that promote climate disinformation both in terms of the share of sites they enable and the ad traffic they monetize."

Using weekly visits as the metric, of the total 113 websites analyzed, Google ads accounted for 97.7% of the projected weekly visits. Assuming an average price, "Google would potentially have pulled in $7.6 million in display advertising revenue over the past year from such sites" the report states.

Of the top 50 climate disinfo websites by traffic, like Breitbart and The Dailies Wire and Caller, Dewey analysts found that Google was serving ads on 39 of them.

Not only is Google still monetizing climate disinfo, it's the biggest player in the game, and it's working with the biggest, most obvious publishers of harmful climate denial. 

Despite its own rule saying it explicitly would not do that. Apparently it’s less of a policy, and more of a request...

 October of 2022, it's _{still all too easy}_ to find climate disinformation on YouTube that's selling ads. FoxNews clips that _{get fact checked}_:{? }_{Still monetized}_:{. UK's version of Fox, GBNews, having }:_{a PR exec}_:{ turned }:_{professional denier}_:{ on to say the "'UK Government has been taken over by sleeper agents"? }_{Making ad money}_:{. Hate speech test case Mark Steyn interviewing pro-J6-insurrection Marc Morano and debunked-by-deniers Monckton about their recent }:_{invitation to be a laughing stock}_:{? }_{Monetized}_:{! Amateur that depends on professionals }:_{Tom Nelson}_:{'s podcast }_{videos}_:{, Alex Epstein }_{on Glenn Beck}_:{, John Stossel tapping deceased denier Pat Michaels to }_{deny hurricane science}_:{, and our favorite, the }:_{canonically bad climate denial video}_:{, }_{the Great Global Warming Swindle}_:{, that }:_{Avaaz called out in 2020}_:{, are all monetized.}:

~CPP factoid

August 3, 2015

IER President Thomas Pyle issued the following statement criticizing President Obama’s Clean Power Plan: [50]

“The final version of President Obama’s ‘Clean Power Plan’ is somehow more harmful than the proposed rule. It forces states to make even steeper cuts, it guts natural gas in favor of costly renewables, and it still has no effect on climate change. While the EPA touts these adjustments to the rule as a sign of ‘flexibility’, it’s really an admission that Obama needs states to do his dirty work. But state leaders shouldn’t give in to the administration’s bribery schemes. Regardless of these cosmetic changes to the rule, the fundamental flaws remain.

“It’s important to remember that President Obama’s carbon regulation, the crown jewel of his climate legacy, has no impact on climate change. EPA’s own models [note triple faced BS] show that their carbon rule will limit global temperature rise by a mere 0.018 degrees Celsius by 2100. That’s a bad deal for the American people. State leaders should protect their citizens from Obama’s costly carbon rule by refusing to submit a plan.”

[[The study, conducted by an international team led by researchers at University of Leeds, says that even if lockdown measures continue until the end of 2021—more than a year and a half in total—the planet may only cool by about 0.018 degrees Fahrenheit by 2030.]]

{{https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-many-problems-the-epas-clean-power-plan-and-climate-regulations-primer

...

The Climate and Environmental Benefits: None

The trade-off that Americans receive for higher electricity rates, unemployment, and lower levels of prosperity is not an appealing one. Even though electricity generation accounts for the single-largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States, the estimated reduction is minuscule compared to global greenhouse gas emissions. Using the “Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Induced Climate Change,” developed with support from the EPA, climatologists Paul Knappenberger and Patrick Michaels estimate that the climate regulations will avert a meager –0.018 degree Celsius (C) of warming by the year 2100.[[14]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-many-problems-the-epas-clean-power-plan-and-climate-regulations-primer#_ftn14)

In fact, the U.S. could cut its CO2 emissions 100 percent and it would not make a difference in global warming...

[[13]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-many-problems-the-epas-clean-power-plan-and-climate-regulations-primer#_ftnref13) Kevin D. Dayaratna, Nicolas Loris, and David W. Kreutzer, “The Obama Administration’s Climate Agenda Will Hit Manufacturing Hard: A State-by-State Analysis,” Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 2990, February 17, 2015, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2015/02/the-obama-administrations-climate-agenda-will-hit-manufacturing-hard-a-state-by-state-analysis.

[[14]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-many-problems-the-epas-clean-power-plan-and-climate-regulations-primer#_ftnref14) Paul C. Knappenberger and Patrick J. Michaels, “0.02°C Temperature Rise Averted: The Vital Number Missing from the EPA’s ‘By the Numbers’ Fact Sheet,” Cato at Liberty blog, June 11, 2014, http://www.cato.org/blog/002degc-temperature-rise-averted-vital-number-missing-epas-numbers-fact-sheet (accessed May 26, 2015).

[[15]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-many-problems-the-epas-clean-power-plan-and-climate-regulations-primer#_ftnref15)Paul C. Knappenberger and Patrick J. Michaels, “Current Wisdom: We Calculate, You Decide: A Handy-Dandy Carbon Tax Temperature-Savings Calculator,” Cato at Liberty blog, July 23, 2013, http://www.cato.org/blog/current-wisdom-we-calculate-you-decide-handy-dandy-carbon-tax-temperature-savings-calculator (accessed May 26, 2015).

[[16]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-many-problems-the-epas-clean-power-plan-and-climate-regulations-primer#_ftnref16) Judith A. Curry, “Statement to the Committee on Environment and Public Works of the United States Senate,” January 16, 2014, http://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=07472bb4-3eeb-42da-a49d-964165860275 (accessed May 26, 2015).

}}

https://www.climatedocket.com/2019/06/26/exxon-climate-denial-american-council-science-health/

exxonMobil is funding a little-known nonprofit that calls itself a “pro-science advocacy organization,” but whose scientific advisory board includes several renowned climate deniers and has worked for decades to sow doubt about the health impacts of climate change.

Records show the ExxonMobil Foundation provided grants of at least $60,000 in both 2017 and 2018 to the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), a group that says its mission is to “publicly support evidence-based science and medicine.”

Members of the ACSH scientific advisory board, however, include a who’s who of climate deniers, includingPatrick J. Michaels, who has worked for more than 30 years on behalf of the fossil fuel industry;S. Fred Singer,who last year wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal falsely claiming that sea level rise is not caused by climate change; andWilliam Happer, a current member of President Trump’s National Security Council who as recently as 2016 argued that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.

Documents recently revealed in an investigation by The Guardian guk show ExxonMobil’s current funding of the ACSH began prior to 1999, when Exxon and Mobil merged to become Exxon Mobil Corporation, one of the largest oil companies in the world.

desmog cred:

sm Biology, University of Chicago (1975). [1]

...Michaels has published numerous research papers in peer-reviewed journals in the area of climate. Michaels has co-published many of his studies with well known climate skeptics. He was co-published numerous papers with Paul C. Knappenberger, Robert E. Davis, David Douglass, andS. Fred Singer.

Some of Michaels's papers were published in Climate Researchjournal around the time that climate skeptic Chris de Freitas was serving as one of the journal's editors. Half of the journal's editors resignedover poor quality control in mid-2003. [81]

Additionally, he has published some of his papers in the journal Energy and Environment, run by climate skeptic Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen. Christiansen has described (PDF) her journal as a place for skeptics to go when their papers are rejected by more mainstream science journals.[82]

For example:...

==

FORK ONE: BUSH 41

1968 Paul Ehrlich Population Bomb (says later should have factored consumption in more? but it's in the formula?)  Reagan "Doomsday Prophet" vs Morning in America.

Donella Meadows et al. The Limits to Growth. 1972 computer model, busines as usual scenario dead on?  Hightlight a debate between Dennis Meadows and Herman Kahn, one of the models for Dr Strangelove (Megadeath from the BLAND Corporation).

In 1975 Margaret Mead helped organize a conference on the atmosphere, analgous o the Traety of the Seas that had been hammered out at supra-national level for the benefit of all to protect the commons.  She pointed out that humans tend to be short-sighted and we forget pai quickly, once biological necessary/helpful but not so much in the modern world; also noted conflicting needs/groups, but we need rational/scientific long term plan (relationships, Macy System thinking).

{{ she freaked out Sununu and Larouche

[global cooling, Sagan...] Sununu had suspected that the greenhouse effect belonged to this nefarious cabal since 1975, when the anthropologist Margaret Mead convened a symposium on the subject at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. “Unless the peoples of the world can begin to understand the immense and long-term consequences of what appear to be small immediate choices,” Mead wrote, “the whole planet may become endangered.”

Her conclusions were stark, immediate and absent the caveats that hobbled the scientific literature. Or as Sununu saw it, she showed her hand: “Never before have the governing bodies of the world been faced with decisions so far-reaching,” Mead wrote. “It is inevitable that there will be a clash between those concerned with immediate problems and those who concern themselves with long-term consequences.” When Mead talked about “far-reaching” decisions and “long-term consequences,” Sununu heard the marching of jackboots. }}

Hansen testified twice, 1988 [Wirth opened window to mess with AC during a heat wave] second time 1989 in front of Gore Committee, complained for being muzzled, Sununu told Richard Darman OMB to do it

Gore went to NYT.

During the 1988 campaign (against Dukakis, Willie Horton, Boston Harbor?] Bush 41 Lake Erie Metro park "The agenda will be clear," Bush said. "We will talk about global warming. We will talk about saving our oceans and preventing the loss of tropical forests. And we will act."  And he said, you know, those who think we can't solve the greenhouse effect haven't heard about the White House effect. And when I'm in the White House, you know, we'll solve it. Rio Earth Summit established framework  --> IPCC (Montreal Protocol on CFC? CTT like CEI abnd Cato moved him on GHG but not CFC's).  Pat Michaels at Cato influenced Sununu.

[[Still, the administration underscored uncertainties in the science, specifically over sources of greenhouse gases, sea-level rise, and connections between power plants and carbon emissions.

"Significant scientific uncertainty still attends global climate change," the White House said.]]

Ozone Man?

Sununu was the first White House Chief of Staff for George H. W. Bush, serving from 1989 to 1991.  Assignd a handler to E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly at Netherlands conference.

{{In his report Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, Nathaniel Rich wrote that in November 1989 Sununu prevented the signing of a 67-nation commitment to freeze carbon dioxide emissions, with a reduction of 20 percent by 2005, and singled him out as a force starting coordinated efforts to bewilder the public on the topic of global warming and changing it from an urgent, nonpartisan and unimpeachable issue to a political issue, and an increasingly intractable one}}

Sununu PhD mechanical/fluid engr MIT 1966 had done some compuer modeling; Mead did not refer to models?  Meadows?

=

This is when the GOP turned away from climate policy

Scott Waldman and Benjamin Hulac, E&E News reportersPublished: Wednesday, December 5, 2018

https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060108785/

the start of the George H.W. Bush presidency, the Republican Party fretted about the dangers of climate change. By the end, it was focused on doubt and inaction.

Since then, the party has drifted further away from the conclusion of scientists and from policies to address global warming.

Bush embraced climate science in the 1980s and campaigned on protecting Americans from its dangers.

"Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect forget about the 'White House effect,'" Bush said in a 1988 campaign speech. "As president, I intend to do something about it."

But as soon as Bush got into office, the administration started to work against meaningful policy on climate change, observers say, even as it crafted strong positions on air pollution to defeat the threat of acid rain.

After his decision on the Clean Air Act amendments, Bush had to be "dragged kicking and screaming" to international climate talks and ceded a chance to make meaningful policy at a time when the world had not yet politicized climate science, said Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton University geosciences professor who attended some of the early climate talks as an observer.

"I wish we had gotten more leadership out of him, the kind of leadership that he showed on acid rain," he said. "If he had exerted the same kind of leadership on climate change, we would be further along today."

The Bush presidency was a "debate over denialism in microcosm," saidJerry Taylor, president of the Niskanen Center and a former climate skeptic who now works to convince conservatives about the dangers of climate change.

Conservatives around the world, including former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, were worried about climate change and looking for policy solutions. Instead, skeptical forces grew stronger, pushed by Washington-based think tanks such as the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. While Bush ignored those groups on acid rain, he acquiesced on climate change.

"The GOP during the Bush presidency pivoted from a position of being torn on how to respond to climate change," Taylor said. "This issue could have gone either way, but we know which way it went. The party could have been on climate change where the party is on acid rain, which is accepting it as a real thing and with some responsibility for a government response and total peace with the decision."

Bush aides wanted to establish the administration as having strong environmental credentials, topping the leaders of England, Canada and France in advance of an economic summit held in July 1989. In a State Department memo that has been declassified, the agency recommended that the United States focus on policies that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions,including supporting nuclear power.

"The theme which runs through these proposals, and which I recommend the President stress, is that of wise, active stewardship over the resources of our planet," a State Department official wrote. "This is a responsibility we have to ourselves and as our legacy to future generations. Every man, woman and child can make a meaningful contribution to carrying out this responsibility. This approach links individual responsibility with national and international responsibility."

Bush used his presidency to foster stewardship in minor ways.

He continued work already underway at the Council on Environmental Quality and the White House science and technology office. And he created the Environment and Conservation Challenge Awards — a program to highlight environmental protection and generate "environmental awareness" — and a recycling network for federal agencies, which hadn't existed before.

While Richard Schmalensee, an economic adviser to Bush, described climate change in a 1990 memo as a theory, the president had already warned of its dangers.

Before reaching the White House, he stumped before a crowd on the banks of Lake Erie in southeast Michigan, where he said he would make climate change a centerpiece of his administration.

"In my first year in office, I will convene a global conference on the environment at the White House," Bush said at the Lake Erie Metropark in 1988, adding that he would invite the Chinese, the Soviets and officials from emerging economies.

"The agenda will be clear," Bush said. "We will talk about global warming. We will talk about saving our oceans and preventing the loss of tropical forests. And we will act."

Months earlier, James Hansen, a NASA scientist, had testified before a Senate committee that the Earth was warming and that humans were the reason.

In his remarks in Michigan, Bush appeared to reference that testimony.

"1988 is the year the Earth spoke back," Bush said. "Our land, water and soil support a remarkable range of human activities. But they can only take so much. We must remember to treat them not as a given, but as a gift."

As then-President Obama argued on a 2015 trip to the Everglades, Bush came from a period when addressing environmental threats — climate change included — was bipartisan in America.

"George H.W. Bush was the first president, globally, to acknowledge the impacts of climate change and that we needed to do something about it," Obama said. "This is not something that historically should be a partisan issue."

In the spring of 1990, Bush did hold a White House summit on the science and economics of "global change" — climate change — a fact he highlighted in a letter the next year to Congress.

The White House wrote in the letter that scientists at the time warned that temperatures could rise "10 to 50 times faster than anything in recorded history" if humans continued to burn fossil fuels.

Still, the administration underscored uncertainties in the science, specifically over sources of greenhouse gases, sea-level rise, and connections between power plants and carbon emissions.

"Significant scientific uncertainty still attends global climate change," the White House said.

Despite Bush's endorsement of Hansen's work on the campaign trail, his administration would later interfere in the public presentation of that research. In 1989, Hansen complained that the Bush administration's Office of Management and Budget toned down the severity of his conclusions before they were delivered to a Senate committee headed by then-Sen. Al Gore (D-Tenn.). That move would foretell later efforts by the administration of President George W. Bush to water down conclusions by climate scientists before they were publicized.

Hansen blames the elder Bush's chief of staff, John Sununu, for misleading the president on climate science.

Sununu was more interested in those who rejected the emerging climate science, including a number of researchers who have continued to battle against consensus science today. Some of them, includingPat Michaels of the Cato Institute, continue to have influence in the Trump administration and have encouraged the rollback of climate protections. Sununu ran his own rudimentary climate models and said that scientists were wrong.

Still, Hansen said Bush pushed forward with the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was a meaningful step forward at the time, and one that President Clinton and the younger Bush neglected to push ahead on.

"The Framework Convention on Climate Change, the product of Rio in 1992, was exactly the right response to all that was revealed in the 1980s," Hansen said in an interview yesterday. "The elder Bush deserves much credit for that. He was being pushed in a very bad direction by the elder Sununu, a real jackass from my perspective as a scientist."

Bush showed hints of taking climate action again near the end of his presidency. But he punted.

Bush was immersed in a tough campaign, which he would ultimately lose, when he bucked members of his party and spoke at the Earth Summit in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro. Bush said he had come with a climate plan in hand. It would focus on energy efficiency, forestry, new technologies and clean air.

He signed an agreement to create a "framework convention on climate change" — the U.N. body that would go on to become the UNFCCC.

"I invite my colleagues from the industrialized world to join in a prompt start on the convention's implementation," Bush said. "Let us join in translating the words spoken here into concrete action to protect the planet."

Bush pledged environmental funding to poorer nations."We come to Rio recognizing that the developing countries must play a role in protecting the global environment but will need assistance in pursuing these cleaner growth," he said.

But then, his administration did little to follow through with those pledges or to fight for something more concrete than a framework. In the end, Bush balked at the most meaningful part of the Rio gathering — setting specific emissions reduction targets.

It turns out Bush was correct. The models showing warming have been borne out, and the problem has worsened, as Hansen predicted. According to the most recent version of the National Climate Assessment, the models may have underpredicted the worst effects. This year and the past three have been the warmest in recorded human history.

So, for all his talk, Bush's climate legacy is that he walked away from pushing a policy that would restrict greenhouse gases at the very moment that the top scientists in the world were saying it posed a crisis for humanity, said Oppenheimer, the Princeton professor.

The resulting void was filled with political fights that have worsened under the Trump administration.

"The real shame is that we saw this coming and we had a chance to get ahead of the impacts of climate change before they manifest themselves, and we just didn't do it," Oppenheimer said.

https://www.desmog.com/wp-content/uploads/files/Pal-review-by-John-Mashey.pdf

no lnx

Chris de Freitas, Pat Michaels and their pals

John R. Mashey,

JohnMasheyAT yahoo DOT com, 11/29/11

Table of Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Active editors, tenure by received dates 3

3 People X Articles & Activities, Chronological 4

4 People X Organizations 5

5 Social Network of the pals, a few hints 6

6 Conclusion 7

A.1 – Papers from Climate Research8

A.2 –Chris de Freitas, Papers and Other Activities 15

A.3 –Pat Michaels - Publications 18

1 Introduction

Good peer review is crucial, but not sufficient for credible scientific

publishing. It is merely an early hurdle. Even in carefully-run journals,

mistakes occur, to be found later by the broader reviews following

publication of anything interesting. In most fields, real junk is ignored. In

climate, such junk gets widely endlessly publicized, forcing debunking.

For a few years,Climate Research, a generally-credible journal, published

some weak or even awful articles. The journal had no Editor-in-Chief, so

authors sent manuscripts to an Associate Editor of their choice. Each

selected reviewers, handled the whole process and accepted papers with no

further oversight. From 1990 to 1996, CR published zero papers from

any of the following, called pals hereafter: Sallie Baliunas, Robert

Balling, John Christy, Robert Davis, (Chris de Freitas), David Douglass,

Vincent Gray, Sherwood Idso, PJ Knappenberger, Ross McKitrick,Pat

Michaels, Eric Posmentier, Arthur Robinson, Willie Soon, and GerdRainer Weber.

2 Chris de Freitas became an editor and then accepted 14

papers from the pals 1997-2003....[much more]

11/30/11

Von Storch seemed the obvious choice to become Editor-in-Chief, given

his handling of 110 papers. The identities of the reviewers used by de

Freitas are (properly) unknown, but one might wonder:

 Did dubious papers often get reviewed by pals (or their friends)?

 Were there negative reviews by others and how much did they count?

The table on next page shows the authors, their papers and other activities,

chronologically. The varied year-widths here align this table with the next.

The pals arrived with de Freitas, sent him most of their papers and

essentially departed after the von Storch resignation.

The papers are listed in Appendix A.1 and then briefly analyzed.

...People X Articles & Activities, Chronological

The following lists pal authors, plus Fred Singer and the George Marshall

Institute (GMI) as key connectors.Most are extracted from MAS2010

pp.97-102. Activities are listed in the Index and described there in more

detail. Higher numbers show stronger involvement. Pals’ CR articles are

shown in red, with relevant climate anti-science activities in black, roughly

chronologically, although some activities continued over years, so that

participation does not imply a specific year. Singer was a close ally of the

GMI founders, of whom two were on his SEPP board (Naomi Oreskes &

Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt, 2010.)

Editorial tenures, by visible received dates, are shown in gray.

Most are noted in www.desmogblog.com/global-warming-denier-database

...

4 sallie is hub?!

balling. michaels

4 People X Organizations

This lists the 15 pals plus Fred Singer, a connection for many, and Madhav

Khandekar. Most are extracted from MAS2010 pp.96-102. A few were

not involved enough in the MAS2010 story to be listed there, but were

found in a more inclusive 600-person table. Higher numbers imply

stronger involvement, described p.96. Organizations are described in more

detail and listed in the MAS2010 Index, p.4. Some people have published

real science (a necessity to build any credibility and access to the research

community), but all have shown persistent involvement with organizations

that do climate anti-science, most of which also have tobacco connections.

Almost everyone has been involved with CATO, (GMI) or Heartland,

usually more than one. Baliunas  18 , Balling  11, Michaels  10 , Soon  9 and Singer  13 each

are listed 9+ times.Knappenberger seems the least involved, but was

Michaels‘ student and has worked for him for decades.

Khandekar arrived at the end of the de Freitas era, so was not included in

the pals group, although he surely knew them well. He did not stay long.

Most pals have been involved in many organizations that do climate

anti-science. The same people appear again and again....

6 Conclusion

When de Freitas became editor, CR was ―open for business‖ and it arrived

quickly from the pals, a group of people who have accumulated a long

history of climate anti-science activities, papers and involvement with

organizations that promote anti-science, not just for climate, but often for

other areas.17

Some papers seemed fine, if not necessarily very important, but some very

dubious papers were accepted.Michaels‘ 7 papers accounted for half of

his entire peer-reviewed production during the period.

When de Freitas left, the flow of papers from pals effectively dried up.

One need know nothing about climate science to see the patterns here.

It is a fine example of lax processes allowing a ―rogue editor‖ to subvert

the normal peer review process. The scientists were not only right to be

worried about CR, but may well have underestimated the extent of the

problem.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to various reviewers and help from DeSmogBlog.

Thanks to CR for giving open access to its older papers.

Most all of all, I thank the legions of scientists who tirelessly do the often

thankless task of peer review and do it well. Most of the articles in CR

seemed reasonable, meaning that editors and reviewers did much work on

other people‘s publications. This case seems a real outlier.

https://www.desmogblog.com/patrick-michaels

missing on main?

==

book: https://www.:{cato.org/books/l:(style="background-color:#ffff00;"):}:ukewarming-new-climate-science-changes-everything-0

blurb BS

When it comes to global warming, most people think there are two camps: “alarmist” or “denier” being their respective pejoratives. Either you acknowledge the existence of man‐​made climate change and consider it a dire global threat, or you deny it exists at all. But there is a third group: the “lukewarmers.” In Lukewarming: The New Climate Science that Changes Everything, Pat Michaels and Chip Knappenberger explain the real science and spin behind the headlines and come to a provocative conclusion: global warming is not hot—it’s lukewarm. Climate change is real, it is partially man‐​made, but it is clearer than ever that its impact has been exaggerated—with many of the headline‐​grabbing predictions now being rendered implausible or impossible.

This new paperback edition of the book is a revised and expanded edition of last year’s ebook‐​only edition of Lukewarming. This new edition includes updates in science and policy following the accords reached at the 2015United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. This fresh analysis is an invaluable source for those looking to be more informed about global warming and the data behind it.

Also available at Amazon.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK

“Pat Michaels and Paul Knappenberger are real climate scientists, who think that man‐​made global warming is real. But they refuse to buy into the politicized pseudoscience that has increasingly been used to buttress the case that global warming is also likely to be dangerous. For this they have been routinely vilified. In this light but serious book, they expose many shocking myths about climate change and make a devastating case for lukewarming.”

—Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist

“This is a splendid book that will help any interested person understand not only the latest advances in honest climate science, but also the nonscientific machinations of the climate movement. I look forward to having a copy of the book in my own library.”

—Will Happer, Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University

“This book is a model of good science. Bad scientists ignore uncomfortable facts; good scientists embrace them. The environmental facts are that the globe is, yet again, warming—but only gently. Pat Michaels describes himself, wittily, as a lukewarmer, and in this witty but penetrating book he shows how good science and sane policies can march together to benefit us all.”

—Terence Kealey, Vice Chancellor of the University of Buckingham

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Patrick J. Michaels is the director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute. Michaels is a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. He is the author or editor of six books on climate and its impact including Climate Coup:Global Warming’s Invasion of Our Government and Our Lives and Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know. Chip Knappenberger is the assistant director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, and coordinates the scientific and outreach activities for the Center. He has over 20 years of experience in climate research and public outreach. He has published numerous papers in the major atmospheric science journals on global warming, hurricanes, precipitation changes, weather and mortality, and Greenland ice melt, among many other areas, and is a very popular presenter at climate conferences worldwide.

independT inst off BS

patrick J. Michaels is Research Fellow at the Independent Institiute and Senior Fellow in the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He is former Director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, past President of the American Association of State Climatologists, and former Chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. He received a Ph.D. in ecological climatology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and he was a contributing author and is a reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

Former Research Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, he has been published in the major scientific journals, including Climate Research, Climatic Change, Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Climate, Nature, and Science, as well as in popular publications worldwide. His books include Lukewarming: The New Climate Science that Changes Everything (with Paul C. Knappenberger), Scientocracy: The Tangled Web of Public Science and Public Policy (with Terence Kealey), Sound and Fury: The Science and Politics of Global Warming, The Satanic Gases, and Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.
VideoVideo
Fixing ScienceFebruary 7, 2020
Research ArticleResearch Article
Disparity of Tropospheric and Surface Temperature Trends: New EvidenceMay 17, 2017

fortune mag ~ wsj op ed

https://fortune.com/2016/01/27/jonas-climate-snow-job/

as  various parts of the nation recover from the fallout of last weekend’s massive blizzard, the three feet of snow that winter storm Jonas dumped in parts of West Virginia and Maryland are prompting many to revisit the debate over the merits of climate change. In a recent editorial in The Wall Street Journal, in particular, the CATO Institute’s Patrick Michaelsmakes a number of scientifically inaccurate statements, whether about humans contributing to climate change, El Nino’s role in 2015’s record heat, the sensitivity of climate to greenhouse gases, or the connection between extreme weather and climate change.

Michaels opens with a description of temperatures, the warming of which peer-reviewed studies have repeatedly found to be caused by human emissions. The latest study, published Monday, finds that the odds of 14 of the 16 warmest years on record all occurring after 2000, would be one in 300,000 were it not for human-made warming. This is just one of many independent lines of evidencethat human activity — namely the burning of fossil fuels — contributes significantly to warming.

Michaels attributes 2015’s record-breaking warmth to El Nino, but that is directly contradicted by what an annual report of temperatures by NASA has found. Gavin Schmidt, director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, told reporters earlier this month that even without El Nino, 2015 would’ve been the warmest year by far. An analysis of Schmidt and other scientist’s calculations puts El Nino’s contribution to the record at only about 10%. And to Michael’s prediction that things will cool down like they did after El Nino from 1997 to 1998, new research shows there’s now twice as much heat in the oceans as there was then.

Pointing to the satellite data, Michaels claims that we shouldn’t expect much more warming. Mainstream scientists, including some that run satellites similar to the ones Michaels cites, are quick to point outthat the surface temperature record is much more robust than satellite data, and other points of evidence (Arctic sea ice melt, glacier melt, ocean heat, sea level rise, etc.) contradict the satellites. This and other issues are addressed in the US National Climate Assessment FAQ. New research also debunks Michaels’ claim that the climate isn’t as sensitive to CO2 as we think.

But the biggest problem with Michaels’ argument is this: By focusing on GDP statistics as a benchmark for extreme weather-related losses, Michaels ignores the debilitating human and environmental impacts not captured by GDP, such as the heat-related deaths of an estimated 2,500 people in the Indian heat wave last June. Munich Re doesn’t insure all of the structures that get damaged or destroyed, just some of the ones that are designed to withstand extreme weather. Even in developed economies, approaches like those of University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr.’s, adjust damage for GDP growth, which is sort of like saying a storm didn’t cause damage if more economic activity is generated rebuilding than was lost. (Also, though 2015 was not as bad a year for reported economic losses as others in recent memory — due in part to the El Nino-induced wind shear that kept hurricanes from forming in the Atlantic — there were still 29 different weather disasters causing over a billion dollars worth of damage, the fourth most in the past 25 years.)

Human-induced climate change is real. The debate is over. We need to get serious about addressing it by reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% to 100% by 2050 or sooner. But here’s the good news: Leading cities around the world like London, New York City, Yokohama, Sydney, Copenhagen, Vancouver, Minneapolis and others are abandoning the dirty economy of the past and ushering in the clean economy of the future — and growing their economies in the process. Cities are showing it can be done. It’s time for others to embrace it too.

Johanna Partin is director of the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance.

student work

no lnx many vid

https://www.statepress.com/article/2021/04/spbiztech-the-business-of-poking-holes

'In the business of poking holes'

How an ASU climatologist helped fuel the climate change skeptic movement

“They were in the business of poking holes and doing whatever they could to make the point which reflected their own beliefs." Illustration published on Wednesday, April 21, 2021.

By Chris Scragg and Jessica Myers |04/22/2021

Editor’s Note: This story includes quotes from two separate interviews with Robert Balling, one in 2019 and another in 2021. Jerry Taylor and Mark Richardson's interviews were also from 2019.

Robert Balling built his career playing devil’s advocate.

Balling, a climatology professor at the School of Geographical Sciences & Urban Planning, saw warnings in the late 1980s that human-emitted carbon dioxide could be disastrous. He said he "saw a niche," to tell the other side.

"The story was always, 'There’s more to the story,'" Balling said of his first book "The Heated Debate: Greenhouse Predictions Versus Climate Reality," published in 1992.

The book was one of the first texts that helped grow a climate change skeptic movement. Balling accepted the central pillar of human-caused global warming, but he questioned the predictions of dire consequences. Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, who died in February, took a liking to the book and talked about it on his popular show, according to Balling.

"If you write a book called 'Heated Debate,' how people use what you write is out of your control," Balling said. "If you feel comfortable that you've adequately represented what's in a professional literature and somebody takes this part of the book and does whatever with it. How do I control that?"

As a distinguished climatologist who conducted research for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the United Nations, Balling considers his skepticism a virtue.

But climate and politics experts say Balling and other skeptics proved useful, even necessary, in the campaign by American conservative elites and fossil fuel executives to undermine environmental protection.

Even as atmospheric carbon dioxide climbed to levels never before seen in human history, climate policy researchers and experts on the topic say conservative operatives carried out a decades-long political campaign, disguised as legitimate scientific discourse, to confuse the public and paralyze political action.

By funding a small cohort of qualified climate skeptics over the past 30 years, conservative think tanks and oil and gas giants like ExxonMobil successfully held off environmental laws and regulations they considered threats to beliefs of individual liberty and unconstrained, free-market capitalism.

A 'frontal assault' on a scientific consensus

“The counter movement has effectively neutered parts of civil society,” said Peter Jacques, a professor at the University of Central Florida School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs.

The movement to delegitimize climate change hijacked the nation's political response so "elites get more and more what they want," and misinformation about climate change is "just getting worse," Jacques said.

"The climate counter movement has become much more empowered, especially with President (Donald) Trump," Jacques said.

Though the emergence of COVID-19 related conspiracies shocked him, they appeared to come "straight from the playbook of climate denial," he said.

His investigations into the climate skeptic movement uncovered its roots in conservative politics funded by the fossil fuel industry. His 2008 study pointed to conservative think tanks as the crucial structure behind climate skepticism.

While scientists acknowledge there were uncertainties about Earth’s sensitivity to human-emitted CO2, the consensus at the time encouraged phasing out fossil fuels, according to a report from the IPCC.

In the early 1990s, conservative think tanks "launched a full-scale counter movement in response to the perceived success of the environmental movement and its supporters," according to Jacques’ study.

These organizations publish books, host conferences and advocate for conservative and libertarian policies. Some of the main players in Jacques’ study include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heartland Institute and the Cato Institute.

The main goal of these organizations, Jacques said, is to advance free-market capitalism, the belief privately owned businesses and their markets should be mostly free from government interference.

But in the face of growing concerns and broad favor among Americans for environmental protection, think tanks had to get creative to fight environmentalism, Jacques said.

"Conservatives realized they couldn’t really attack with a frontal assault towards environmental protections because most Americans believed that was a good thing," Jacques said. 

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So instead of attacking the values of environmentalism, they took aim against the facts and mainstream climate scientists.

Climate scientists, like NASA physicist Mark Richardson, said the result was a "concerted smear campaign" against climate scientists.

"There certainly has been a very well-funded attempt for decades to emphasize these points of view way above the weight that they have in terms of the evidence," he said.

Richardson co-authored a 2013 study that determined 97% of climate scientists attributed warming to human activities.

Balling, however, would consider himself part of that 97% who believe humans are warming the Earth, but he doesn’t buy into the idea “something horrible is about to happen," he said.

"I’m confident that the world will be fine and that people in the next 50 (to) 100 years will be as well off if not more well off than we are," Balling said.

In the late 1980s, Republican politicians were more open to accepting the dangers presented by climate change, said Jerry Taylor, the former director of natural resource studies and vice president for development at the Cato Institute.

"Our job was to roll that back," Taylor said of Republican support for environmental protection.

Taylor, who left the organization in 2014 and switched sides in the climate debate, said leaders at Cato were concerned about the "implications of granting the reality of climate change."

"If you grant the reality of climate change, the entire libertarian agenda, which is to minimize the role of government, gets blown apart," Taylor said. 

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To fight back, Taylor said Cato and other think tanks sought to "make the argument that there were a lot of scientists who were skeptical about the extreme stories about climate change."

The Cato Institute’s stance on global warming is that it is “indeed real, and human activity has been a contributor since 1975,” however, it is a “very complicated and difficult issue that can provoke very unwise policy in response to political pressure.”

Richardson said the strategy resulted in a camp of credible skeptics, some with Ph.D.s in climate science, to be "overemphasized in the public sphere."

"If you don’t want to believe (climate change) for whatever reason, you’re more willing to listen to someone who’s telling you the stuff you want to hear," he said. "If you have a Ph.D., that is almost like a shield you can then use."

Kristin Millie Salazar

“If you grant the reality of climate change, the entire libertarian agenda, which is to minimize the role of government, gets blown apart." Illustration published on Wednesday, April 21, 2021.

'Skeptical all the way'

Casting doubt on climate change helped Balling get to where he is today, and he doesn’t regret any of it.

"I wouldn’t do anything differently," he said.

Balling said his climate research and affinity for skepticism in the late 1980s led him to conferences where he rubbed shoulders with other global warming doubters such as Patrick Michaels.

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A climatologist and former research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, Michaels became a leading global warming skeptic and the former director for the study of science at the Cato Institute.

Michaels often appeared in television interviews and at Congressional hearings to attack climate science and policy. The two bonded at a conference and partnered to write books. 

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"Pat Michaels was pure, he was skeptical all the way," Balling said. "He would be like a caged tiger before we’d do these things."

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While other scientists were focused on presenting research, Michaels was preparing for the debate, Balling said.

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"Michaels was a killer."

Balling said Michaels "kickstarted" his role in the climate change skeptic camp. They wrote two books together — "The Satanic Gases," and "Climate of Extremes," both published by the Cato Institute.

In the 90s, Balling said he stood in for Michaels in climate debates and conferences.

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For over a decade, Balling traveled around the world to give dozens of presentations with titles like "A Climate of Doubt About Global Warming," and "Global Warming: Messy Models, Decent Data, and Pointless Policy" to a wide range of audiences from state legislatures and universities to fossil fuel associations and conservative think tanks, according to his curriculum vitae.

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His newfound success was "unbelievable," Balling said. 

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"It was like I lived on an airplane."

Taylor, who knew Balling and worked with Michaels, said the duo's books sold well and were used by Cato to "elevate climate skepticism to a threshold of respectability."

Taylor said their work among others' was essential to their campaigns because "without that, there’s just not much there."

Balling acknowledged the "political dimension" to the global warming debate but said he wasn’t interested in it.

"You turn on any of the many radio stations where the conservative side is presenting their vision of climate change, but I tend to turn that off pretty quickly and listen to sports radio," Balling said.

And he doesn’t feel any of his work published by conservative think tanks was consequential in the politics surrounding global warming.

:{

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"Come on, I mean, it must not have had that big of an impact. We’ve had years of (the) Obama Administration," he said. "Any impact it would’ve had would’ve been well gone before any Trump came along."

Balling also said he didn’t directly work with the Cato Institute, but he instead worked for Michaels who had a close relationship with Cato.

"What I did for Michaels when we worked together was scour the literature in climate science and consistently try to find what’s been published that would be used in a debate format," Balling said. "Somebody says 'X,' we’re going to say something else but grounded in the (scientific) literature."

Publishing a scientific book for a think tank is much different from submitting a paper to a peer-reviewed journal, according to Jacques, "it's free speech."

During this time, Balling was at ASU publishing his climate research in peer-reviewed journals and working on projects sponsored by fossil fuel companies.

After a conference in the late '90s, Balling said former ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond approached him. As CEO, Raymond dismissed climate change and criticized policies to regulate fossil fuels.

Raymond recommended Balling look into getting funded by Exxon, and he followed Raymond’s advice and applied for Exxon funding for two studies. Balling received nearly $100,000, which he said was paid to ASU to cover the research.

:{

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"I just think they were good neighbors," Balling said. "They funded everybody."

'How do you know what you think you know?'

"We see the forest and we see the trees, and they both thank us for the CO2 we're adding to the atmosphere," Balling wrote in a 2003 essay titled “The Forest and the Trees.”

"So drive out to the forest and feel good about the CO2 coming out of your tailpipe!"

Plants see elevated carbon dioxide levels "as a gift of the Industrial Revolution," he wrote. 

:{

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"It's like they're going home again."

Increased CO2 promotes photosynthesis and plant growth, but the CO2 concentrations in our atmosphere today are higher than they’ve been in at least 500,000 years, according to NASA. Such a glut of heat-trapping gas is already destabilizing the climate, according to experts, resulting in sea level rise, droughts, floods and other severe weather.

And the trees that absorb CO2 won’t make a dent with deforestation taking place on a massive scale.

When asked about this essay, Balling told The State Press in an email that at the time, he was interested in the biological benefits of elevated CO2.

Taylor said most climate skeptics’ convictions are "genuinely held." Jacques also said he believed scientists, Balling included, stood by the integrity of their research.

Skeptics initially had valid reasons to be critical, Richardson said, and the complexity of the problem provided "space for more debate" about how detrimental climate change could be. 

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For example, when satellite temperature data was studied in 1998, there was no warming in the atmosphere, which Balling emphasized at the time.

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Since then, satellite data has shown rapid atmospheric warming. 

"As we get more and more evidence, it builds up into narrowing down this range of uncertainty that we have," Richardson said.

But as the evidence grew of extreme effects from climate change, Taylor said skeptics engaged in "dodgy reasoning and argument, even when they know it’s dodgy."

According to Jacques, dodgy reasoning is enough to fuel the movement.

"The counter movement doesn't actually have to win any scientific arguments," Jacques said. "All they have to do is cast doubt to immobilize the policy debates. That's a win for them. That's all they want."

For a scientific consensus to be challenged, there has to be substantial doubt, and Taylor said that's what the campaign aimed for.

"They were in the business of poking holes and doing whatever they could to make the point which reflected their own beliefs," Taylor said.

Combating climate change skepticism is important, but difficult, Jacques said.

"People really haven't been very good at vetting information," he said, mentioning the popularity of conspiracy theories in the U.S. today. He also said they're prevalent because most people don’t have time to vet this information thoroughly, so in the end, it comes down to representation and trust in a source.

Jacques said everyone should ask themselves, "how did you get that opinion? Where did it come from? How do you know what you think you know about climate change?"

Leaving it all behind

The atmosphere around the debate became too heated for Balling, and he decided to leave it all behind in 2008.

“It wasn’t a very friendly game anymore,” he said.

In 2009, some skeptics accused high-profile climate scientists of hiding temperature data that didn’t show warming based on thousands of leaked emails.

The scandal was called "Climategate," but several official investigations and reviews of the emails found no wrongdoing by the scientists.

Balling knew at least one of the targeted scientists, and he felt the whole thing was "really unfair."

"It just seemed like people got into this gotcha mode," he said. "If that’s what this has come down to, I’m done."

Years after he shifted focus to run the Master of Advanced Study in Geographic Information Systems program, Balling’s past came back to haunt him.

In 2015, Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Tucson) asked ASU President Michael Crow to investigate Balling for alleged conflicts of interest and failure to disclose funding from The Heartland Foundation, a conservative think tank that hosted a conference where Balling spoke. 

:{

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Balling said ASU launched an investigation into his conduct, but nothing ever came from it. 

"I knew in my heart they weren’t going to find anything," Balling said. "I even had some family members ask if everything was OK. I said it’s fine, it’s all part of the greenhouse debating business."

It wasn’t like climate skeptics were "lying or deceiving anybody," Balling said.

In fact, Balling said, he and others were "trying over and over to say there’s more to the story."

The climate debate continues to rage on, and while Balling no longer publicly engages in it, he reminisced on that “little circuit where you could go out and look at parts of the climate change debate.”

“You get kind of swept up at the time, the sort of excitement of the whole debate and this travel,” Balling said. “All of a sudden you’re getting picked to do things for the United Nations.

“It was really a blessing, in some ways, to get to do it all."

Reach the reporters at cscragg@asu.edu and jlmyer10@asu.edu. Follow @monsoonchaser and @jessvmyers on Twitter.

Like The State Press on Facebook and follow @statepress on Twitter.

Continue supporting student journalism and donate to The State Press today.

https://www.cato.org/blog/more-data-fiddling-another-warming-pause-about-start

january 19, 2018

More Data Fiddling—Is Another Warming “Pause” About to Start?

By Patrick J. Michaels

Yesterday Jim Hansen, now with Columbia University, and several of his colleagues released their summary of 2017 global temperatures. Their history, published by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has constantly been evolving in ways that make the early years colder and the later years hot. I recently posted on how this can happen, and the differences between these modified datasets and those determined objectively (i.e. without human meddling).

For a couple years I have been pointing out (along with Judith Curry and others) that the latest fad—which puts a lot of warming in recent data—is to extend high‐​latitude land weather station data far out over the Arctic Ocean. Hansen’s crew takes stations north of 64⁰ latitude and extends them an astounding 1200 kilometers into the ocean.

This, plainly speaking, is a violation of one of the most fundamental principles of thermodynamics, which is that when matter is changing its state (from, say, solid to liquid), a stirred fluid will remain at “freezing” until it is all liquid, whereupon warming will commence.

This also applies in the Arctic, where the fluid is often stirred by strong winds. So if, say, Resolute, one of the northernmost land stations, is 50⁰F, and the Arctic is mixed water‐​ice (it always is), that 50 degrees will be extended out 1200 kilometers where the air‐​sea boundary temperature has to be around 30⁰F, the freezing point of seawater up there.

Hansen et al. did pay some attention to this, noting this extension, which they normally apply to their data, was responsible for making 2017 the second‐​warmest year in their record. If they “only” extended 250km (still dicey), it would drop their “global” temperatures by a tenth of a degree, which would send the year down a rank. The result of all of this is that the big “spike” at the end of their record is in no small part due to the 1200km extension that turns thermodynamics on its head.

There’s another interesting pronouncement in the NASA announcement; many people have noted that the sun is a bit cool in recent years, and that it continues to trend slightly downward. The changes in its radiance are probably good for a tenth of a degree (C) of surface temperature or so. Hansen et al. use this to provide covering fire should warming stall out yet again:

Therefore, because of the combination of the strong 2016 El Niño and the phase of the solar cycle, it is plausible, if not likely, that the next 10 years of global temperature change will leave an impression of a ‘global warming hiatus’.

The significance of this will all fall out in the next year or so. If temperatures head back down all the way to their pre‐​El Niño levels, that will ultimately bring back the post‐​1996 “pause.” We’re going to guess they are going to remain a couple of tenths of a degree above that, based on what happened after the big one in 1998, where they settled a small amount above the pre‐​El Niño of the earlier 1990s.

If the recent warming rate (adjusting for El Niño) continues, we’ll hear that it is doing so “despite” the sun. Given that one year (2018) can have little influence on a recent trendline, that copy may already have been written!

All of this begs the question: Hansen notes in his release that the warming rate since 1970 has been fairly constant, about 0.17⁰C per decade, and didn’t note that the average of the UN’s climate models say it should be about twice that now. More lukewarming.

Topics

Energy and Environment

==

:{https://www.desmogblog.com/:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{covideniers-anti-science-covid-19-denial-overlaps-climate-denial:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:

The climate science denial machine created by the fossil fuel industry is now a major source of COVID-19 disinformation. Deniers have deployed many of the same tactics they have used to attack climate scientists and delay action to downplay the severity of the coronavirus outbreak and sow distrust in the response efforts of governments, scientists and the medical community — with deadly consequences that are now unfolding before our eyes.

Others have used the threat of COVID-19 to argue against action to address climate change, which would leave us all more vulnerable to the wide array of future catastrophes that scientists say will result from additional degrees of warming.

In the following series, DeSmog presents the #COVIDenial evidence our team has gathered revealing the overlapping cast of characters who have long attacked climate science and are now spreading COVID misinformation, touting false cures, ginning up conspiracy theories and fomenting attacks on public health experts. We began tracking this overlap in March 2020, when Sharon Kelly wrote Meet the Climate Science Deniers Who Downplayed COVID-19 Risks.

Many of these groups, including Koch network-funded entities such as Americans for Prosperity and State Policy Networkmembers have also attacked stay-at-home orders and orchestrated ‘Liberate’ movement protests nationwide, as Steve Horn wrote in COVID-19 'Liberate' Groups Are the Same Ones Pushing Climate Denial. And as DeSmog UK’s Zak Derler reported in Climate Science Deniers Use Coronavirus to Downplay Environmental Threats, notorious climate deniers around the world are even claiming that the novel coronavirus pandemic is a hoax, or that it’s an evil plot by “globalist elites” like Bill Gates and George Soros to alternately force vaccines or a “world population cull.”

These are dangerous operatives at work spreading all manner of doubt and delusion to confuse the public, and their actions and words will forever cement them on the wrong side of history.

Explore the report materials below, and please contact DeSmog with any other examples of COVID denial you come across

COVIDenial Executive Summary:

"Government should be doing little or next to nothing,” Richard Ebeling wrote in a postabout COVID-19 republished on March 24 by the Heartland Institute. “The problem is a social and medical one, and not a political one.”

“I just think we're going to be fine. I think everything is going to be fine,” Heartland editorial director and research fellow Justin Haskins said about COVID-19 during a March 1episode of the podcast In the Tank. “I really don't think this is going to be a problem even two to three months from now.”

On Dec. 31, 2019, “a pneumonia of unknown cause” was first reported to the World Health Organization’s China Country Office — and in the months following that report, the disease now known as COVID-19 spread to infect millions of people worldwide and seems well on its way to killing hundreds of thousands — while experts warn that the presumed death toll may be significantly higher than we yet know.

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As the virus spread, so too did misinformation: baseless predictions that the disease would not cause significant harm, claims of miracle cures, and conspiracy theories about the virus’s origins. That misinformation was often circulated by white-collar professionals — including many who have a history of casting doubt on climate science or seeking to debate issues that were already laid to rest within the scientific community. The overlap was so striking that it caught the attention of both former PresidentBarack Obama and late-night host Jimmy Kimmel in March.

Some of that misinformation on COVID-19 came straight from President Trump. But a river of faulty information on the coronavirus also flowed from think tanks, experts (some self-proclaimed), academics, and professional right-wing activists who also have spurned climate science and sought to slow or stop action to respond to the climate crisis.

Some compared COVID-19 to the flu or other threats, suggesting that the flu was a larger threat and that action to slow the spread of the novel virus was an overreaction. As the toll from COVID-19 grew, others argued that the virus was the most important threat and that action to slow climate change was superfluous. Some circulated false or unproven cures and remedies while others touted the benefits of single-use plastics during the pandemic (without regard for the health of those living in places where plastics and petrochemicals are produced — like Saint John the Baptist parish, Louisiana, which on April 16, had the highest per-person COVID-19 death rate in the U.S.)

Some attacked renewable energy, some the Green New Deal, and others the World Health Organization (WHO). Some framed efforts to “flatten the curve” of infections as infringements on liberty or simply unnecessary while others persisted in using terms that the WHO has warned can lead to dangerous stigma and discrimination. And some climate science deniers have circulated conspiracy theories, like claims that the virus was a foreign “bioweapon,” that it’s linked to “electrosmog” and 5G networks, or alleged that “the World Health Organization has carried out the greatest fraud perhaps in modern history.”

The decades that fossil fuel companies spent funding organizations that sought to undermine the conclusions of credible climate scientists and building up doubt about science itself ultimately created a network of professional science deniers who are now deploying some of the same skills they honed on climate against the public health crisis at the center of our attention today.

Many of the operatives spreading COVID disinformation have influence because of the fossil fuel industry.

COVID denial reveals the deadly threat that climate denial poses to all aspects of public health and science. 

==

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Patrick_Michaels

always fun

==

https://yyy.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jun/25/30-years-later-deniers-are-still-lying-about-hansens-amazing-global-warming-prediction

guk many lnx

30 years later, deniers are still lying about Hansen’s amazing global warming prediction

Koch paychecks seem to be strong motivators to lie

Dana Nuccitelli

Mon 25 Jun 2018 06.00 EDT Last modified on Wed 27 Jun 2018 00.39 EDT

[In this May 9, 1989 file photo, Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, testifies before a Senate Transportation subcommittee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., a year after his history-making testimony telling the world that global warming was here and would get worse.

Thirty years ago, James Hansen testified to Congress about the dangers of human-caused climate change. In his testimony, Hansen showed the results of his 1988 study using a climate model to project future global warming under three possible scenarios, ranging from ‘business as usual’ heavy pollution in his Scenario A to ‘draconian emissions cuts’ in Scenario C, with a moderate Scenario B in between.

Changes in the human effects that influence Earth’s global energy imbalance (a.k.a. ‘anthropogenic radiative forcings’) have in reality been closest to Hansen’s Scenario B, but about 20–30% weaker thanks to the success of the Montreal Protocol in phasing out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Hansen’s climate model projected that under Scenario B, global surface air temperatures would warm about 0.84°C between 1988 and 2017. But with a global energy imbalance 20–30% lower, it would have predicted a global surface warming closer to 0.6–0.7°C by this year.

The actual 1988–2017 temperature increase was about 0.6°C. Hansen’s 1988 global climate model was almost spot-on.

[Scenario B from Hansen’s 1988 paper, with the trend reduced by 27% to reflect the actual radiative forcing from 1984 to 2017, compared to global surface temperature data from Cowtan & Way.

In the WSJ, deniers again lie about Hansen

The incredible accuracy of Hansen’s climate model predictions debunks a number of climate denier myths. It shows that climate models are accurate and reliable, that global warming is proceeding as climate scientists predicted, and thus that we should probably start listening to them and take action to address the existential threat it poses.

Hansen’s predictions have thus become a target of climate denier misinformation.It began way back in 1998, when the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels – who has admitted that something like 40% of his salary comes from the fossil fuel industry – arguably committed perjury in testimony to Congress. Invited by Republicans to testify as the Kyoto Protocol climate agreement was in the works, Michaels was asked to evaluate how Hansen’s predictions were faring 10 years later.

In his presentation, Michaels deleted Hansen’s Scenarios B and C – the ones closest to reality – and only showed Scenario A to make it seem as though Hansen had drastically over-predicted global warming. Deleting inconvenient data in order to fool his audience became a habit for Patrick Michaels, who quickly earned a reputation of dishonesty in the climate science world, but has nevertheless remained a favorite of oil industry and conservative media.

Last week in the Wall Street Journal, Michaels was joined by Ryan Maue in an op-ed that again grossly distorted Hansen’s 1988 paper. Maue is a young scientist with a contrarian streak who’s published some serious research on hurricanes, but since joining the Cato Institute last year, seems to have sold off his remaining credibility to the fossil fuel industry.

In their WSJ opinion piece, Michaels and Maue claimed:

Global surface temperature has not increased significantly since 2000, discounting the larger-than-usual El Niño of 2015-16. Assessed by Mr. Hansen’s model, surface temperatures are behaving as if we had capped 18 years ago the carbon-dioxide emissions responsible for the enhanced greenhouse effect.

They provided no evidence to support this claim (evidence and facts seem not to be allowed on the WSJ Opinion page), and it takes just 30 seconds to fact check. In reality, global surface temperatures have increased by about 0.35°C since 2000 – precisely in line with Hansen’s 1988 model projections, as shown above. And it’s unscientific to simply “discount” the El Niño of 2015-16, because between the years 1999 and 2014, seven were cooled by La Niña events while just four experienced an El Niño warming. Yet despite the preponderance of La Niña events, global surface temperatures still warmed 0.15°C during that time. There’s simply not an ounce of truth to Michaels’ and Maue’s central WSJ claim.

Andrew Dessler

(@AndrewDessler)

Dumbest sentence in WSJ oped: "Global surface temperature has not increased significantly since 2000, discounting the larger-than-usual El Niño of 2015-16."

Translation: "Temperature has not increased if you omit the data showing it has increased."

June 22, 2018

It’s also worth noting that Hansen’s 1988 paper accurately predicted the geographic pattern of global warming, with the Arctic region warming fastest and more warming over land masses than the oceans. And climate deniers in the 1980s like Richard Lindzen were predicting “that the likelihood over the next century of greenhouse warming reaching magnitudes comparable to natural variability seems small.” If anyone deserves criticism for inaccurate climate predictions, it’s deniers like Lindzen who thought there wouldn’t be any significant warming, when in reality we’ve seen the dramatic global warming that James Hansen predicted.

Michaels’ and Maue’s misinformation didn’t stop there:

"And it isn’t just Mr. Hansen who got it wrong. Models devised by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have, on average, predicted about twice as much warming as has been observed since global satellite temperature monitoring began 40 years ago.

Once again, this unsupported assertion is completely wrong. I evaluated the IPCC’s global warming projections in my book, and showed in detail that theirs have been among the most accurate predictions. The climate model temperature projections in the 1990, 1995, 2001, and 2007 IPCC reports were all remarkably accurate; the IPCC predicted global warming almost exactly right.

Why lie? To keep cashing Koch paychecks

We don’t even have to guess at the motivation behind Michaels’ and Maue’s misinformation; they give it away toward the end of their opinion piece, asking:

Why should people world-wide pay drastic costs to cut emissions when the global temperature is acting as if those cuts have already been made?

Michaels and Maue don’t want us to cut carbon pollution, and it’s easy to understand why. They work for the Cato Institute, which was co-founded by and is heavily controlled by the Koch brothers, who have donated more than $30 million to Cato. As Michaels admitted, they’re basically fossil fuel industry employees.

But the answers to their question are simple. As climate scientists have predicted for decades, global temperatures are rising dangerously rapidly. Moreover, research has shown that the economic benefits of cutting carbon pollution far outweigh the costs.

Michaels and Maue want us to bet the future of all life on Earth. They want us to put all our chips on black – a bet that burning billions of barrels of oil and billions of tons of coal every year won’t cause dangerous climate change. They want us to make that bet even though their arguments are based on unsupported lies, whilst they cash paychecks from the Koch brothers.

We would have to be incredible suckers to take their bet.

==

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/us-think-tank-shuts-down-prominent-center-challenged-climate-science

:{:{E&E News:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:

The Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., quietly shut down a program that for years sought to raise uncertainty about climate science, leaving the libertarian think tank co-founded by Charles Koch without an office dedicated to global warming.

The move came after Pat Michaels, a climate scientist who rejects mainstream researchers’ concerns about rising temperatures, left Cato earlier this year amid disagreements with officials in the organization.

“They informed me thatthey didn’t think their vision of a think tank was in the science business, and so I said, ‘OK, bye,’” Michaels said in an interview yesterday. “There had been some controversy going around the building for some time, so things got to a situation where they didn’t work out.”

A spokeswoman said Cato’s shuttering of the Center for the Study of Science does not represent a shift in the institute’s position on human-caused climate change. But the think tank moved decisively to close down the science wing that was overseen by Michaels. Ryan Maue, a meteorologist and former adjunct scholar, also left the center.

“While it is true that, with the departure of Pat Michaels, we have deactivated our Center for the Study of Science, we continue to work on science policy issues,” Khristine Brookes, the spokeswomen, wrote in an email. She didn’t mention climate change.

Michaels is among a small number of academics with legitimate climate science credentials who downplay the human contribution to rising temperatures. He is a frequent guest on Fox News and other conservative outlets, and he has spent years attacking efforts to address climate change. He was influential in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, and he helped turn the GOP away from climate policy at a time when conservatives were embracing it (*Climatewire*, Dec. 5, 2018). That shift has endured.

Cato also is no longer affiliated with Richard Lindzen, an emeritus professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has long been critical of established climate science. Lindzen was a distinguished fellow at the think tank. It’s unclear when he left Cato, and Brookes declined to comment on personnel issues.

Maue, who worked with Michaels, said other think tanks cultivated closer relationships with the Trump White House.

“In terms of climate change and regulation, Cato was not a big player at all in the Trump administration,” he said.[vs ECELL CEI]

Michaels was not asked to take part in the White House plan for an “adversarial” review of climate science related to the National Climate Assessment. Michaels has been critical of government climate reports for decades and has published research in major scientific journals. Both of those are seen as attributes by recruiters in charge of finding experts for the White House panel.

Michaels has spent years attacking climate modeling, which he claims ran hot, despite evidence from NASA that contradicted his claims and demonstrated that models were largely accurate. He has also portrayed academic researchers in climate-related fields as beholden to funding that incentivizes them to produce alarming research. The Cato Institute has received millions of dollars from the Koch network, the Mercer Family Foundation, Exxon Mobil Corp. and other foundations that oppose regulations.

Maue said theNiskanen Center,which was founded by Cato alumnus Jerry Taylor, has attracted conservative followers with its middle-of-the-road climate policy. That’s appealing to businesses that help fund think tanks and to those that might support policy positions on climate in the post-Trump era, he said.

“That’s attractive to business and politicians who don’t really want to see the climate flame wars continuing on,” Maue said in an interview. “I think many businesses have taken an approach to what’s going to happen and, assuming Trump isn’t around in 2021, what’s coming down the pike.”

Still, Maue said that one of Michaels’ lasting contributions in the climate policy debate was to create a position where one can accept that humans are affecting the climate but not as much as the vast majority of scientists claim. It’s now a de facto position for many Republican lawmakers who acknowledge that humans are contributing to climate change but don’t want to restrict fossil fuel use.

“Where Pat’s influence is is in the term ‘lukewarming,’” Maue said. “Lukewarming is not climate denial; it’s just that he’s taking, and most of us on this side of the issue believe in lower climate sensitivity. We don’t believe there’s going to be 5 degrees of warming; we figure it’s at the lower end of 1.5 degrees.”

The vast majority of climate scientists believe that the world could warm 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels within the next two decades and accelerate through the end of the century, with some estimates placing warming above 5°C.

Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. Copyright 2019. E&E provides essential news for energy and environment professionals at :{:{www.eenews.net:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:

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Conservative Op-Eds Argued Wrongly That China and India Are Not Taking Action

Right-wing op-eds falsely claimed that China, India and other developing nations were not committed to Paris goals.

In a syndicated column that appeared in USA Today and USA Today Network newspapers, Phil Kerpen, president of American Commitment and a former vice president of Americans for Prosperity, wrote, "The Paris treaty effectively bans coal-fired power plants in the United States—while China has 368 coal plants under construction and more than 800 in the planning stage. India's coal production under the deal is allowed to double by 2020—and they are likely to have emissions much higher than what they promised." And in his anti-Paris op-ed in theBoston Herald, Loris wrote, "Developing nations want affordable, dependable energy to raise their standards of living, and countries such as India, China and Indonesia need to use a lot of coal to get there."

China and India are on pace to meet their emissions targets ahead of schedule.

The Washington Post recently reported that an analysis conducted by the Climate Action Tracker found that "China and India are on track to overachieve on their climate pledges" and quoted Bill Hare, CEO of the nonprofit science and policy institute Climate Analytics, saying that China and India "are going to slow the global growth in CO2 emissions significantly." A New York Times editorial discussing the same analysis noted, "The shift from fossil fuels has ... been much faster and more pronounced than most experts expected. China has reduced coal use for three years in a row and recently scrapped plans to build more than 100 coal power plants. Indian officials have estimated that country might no longer need to build new coal plants beyond those that are already under construction."

China and India are taking big steps to develop clean energy and scale back coal plants.

In January of this year, China announced that it plans to spend more than $360 billion through 2020 on renewable energy sources and is canceling plans to build more than 100 coal-fired power plants. Last year, India announced that it plans to get 57 percent of its total electricity capacity from renewable sources by 2027 and launch a $2 billion equity fund to boost renewable energy development. According to The Associated Press, a March report by the groups CoalSwarm, the Sierra Club and Greenpeace found that "construction starts for coal-fired plants in China and India were down by 62 percent in January from a year earlier while new facilities starting operation declined 29 percent." Additionally, a May 22 New York Times editorial noted, "Electric vehicle sales in China jumped 70 percent last year, thanks in large part to generous government incentives. India is much further behind in this area, but the country's minister of power said last month that all cars sold in the country should be electric by 2030.

Developing nations pushed for a strong Paris agreement and were "crucial" to its adoption.

Developing countries, including the least developed countries, were a key part of the "high ambition coalition" that called for tougher climate change policies and "was widely credited with ensuring the Paris meeting ended in agreement," according to Climate Change News. Far from pushing for a weak agreement and wanting leeway to burn coal, the developing nations have been insistent on the need for fast action to deal with climate change, and have sounded alarms about the role of corporations and lobbyists in UN climate negotiations, fearing that they might weaken emissions goals.

Developing nations committed to cutting emissions even though it's more difficult for them and they have less responsibility to do so.

The world's developing countries have emitted only a small proportion of the climate-warming gases that humans have sent into the atmosphere over the past 160 years, and so they're responsible for only a small proportion of the global warming the world is experiencing. And yet all but two of the world's developing nations signed onto the Paris agreement and submitted action plans, many of which experts said were ambitious. Yet developing countries face a tougher challenge reducing emissions than their wealthier counterparts do. As Robert Lempert of the RAND Corporation explained to the Chicago Tribune, "The richest countries have much of their economy in lower-emitting sectors. ... The U.S. can grow their economy and improve their quality of life without increasing energy use. But in developing countries, you can't do that."

Op-Eds Against the Agreement Pushed Climate Science Denial

Anti-Paris agreement op-eds spread climate science misinformation.

In an op-ed for The Washington Times, Princeton emeritus physics professor and climate denier William Happer wrote that the U.S. "should withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement," claiming, "For too long, well-meaning policymakers have been misled by propaganda, masquerading as science, that more atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) will harm the planet ... More CO2 is not a pollutant but is a benefit to humanity." In an op-ed in The Hill, Patrick J. Michaels of the Cato Institute attempted to undermine the scientific rationale behind the Paris agreement by disputing that human activity is the dominant cause of recent global warming.

Slate's Phil Plait: Claiming CO2 is not a pollutant is "ridiculous" and "in-your-face wrong."

In a Feb. 18 column, science journalist Phil Plait wrote in Slate that the frequently used climate-denier claim that CO2 is not a pollutant is "ridiculous," "in-your-face wrong" and a "typical denier distraction technique, trying to downplay or distract you from what's really going on." He summarized the overwhelming scientific consensus: While some carbon dioxide is necessary for plant life, burning fossil fuels and thus releasing excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is warming up the globe "too quickly for many living things to adapt." Carbon pollution is causing rapid changes to the Earth's climate, and, as Plait explained, that speed is the "danger; the rate at which we are heating the planet is unprecedented."

Humans are "by far" the dominant cause of global warming.

InsideClimate News reported in 2016 that "ninety to 100 percent of climate scientists agree that the planet is warming due to human activity, according to a peer-reviewed paper published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters. The study, called a 'consensus on consensus' synthesizes findings from prior published research." In 2013, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported, "It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century." The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change defines "extremely likely" as having 95 to 100 percent probability. A 2009 letter signed by 18 U.S. scientific organizations stated that "greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver" of climate change. In a 2012 literature review for the blog Skeptical Science, Dana Nuccitelli laid out the overwhelming evidence that humans are the primary driver of climate change, writing, "A wide variety of statistical and physical approaches all arrived at the same conclusion: that humans are the dominant cause of the global warming over the past century, and particularly over the past 50 years. This robust scientific evidence is why there is a consensus among scientific experts that humans are the dominant cause of global warming."

Reposted with permission from our media associate Media Matters for America.

==

did damage control attacking von storch in WSJ after german jrnl punk exposed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soon_and_Baliunas_controversy

6 eds resigned, incl main

==

2003 bogus paper allowed B43 pivot?

guardian.com/environment/2010/feb/02/hacked-climate-emails-flaws-peer-review

guard uk no links

...The head of the CRU, Professor Phil Jones, as a top expert in his field, was regularly asked to review papers and he sometimes wrote critical reviews that may have had the effect of blackballing papers criticising his work.

Here is how it worked in one case.

A key component in the story of 20th-century warming is data from sparse weather stations in Siberia. This huge area appears to have seen exceptional warming of up to 2C in the past century. But in such a remote region, actual data is sparse. So how reliable is that data, and do scientists interpret it correctly?

In March 2004, Jones wrote to ­Professor Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, saying that he had "recently rejected two papers [one for the Journal of ­Geophysical Research and one for Geophysical Research Letters] from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised".

He did not specify which papers he had reviewed, nor what his grounds for rejecting them were. But the Guardian has established that one was probably from Lars Kamel a Swedish astrophysicist ­formerly of the University of Uppsala. It is the only paper published on the topic in the journal that year.

Kamel analysed the temperature records from weather stations in part of southern Siberia, around Lake Baikal. He claimed to find much less warming than Jones, despite analysing much the same data.

Kamel told the Guardian: "Siberia is a test case, because it is supposed to be the land area with most warming in the 20th century." The finding sounded important, but his paper was rejected by Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) that year.

Kamel was leaving academic science and never tried to publish it elsewhere. But the draft seen by the Guardian asserts that the difference between his findings on Siberia temperatures and that of Jones is "probably because the CRU compilation contains too little correction for urban warming." He does not, however, justify that conclusion with any data or analysis.Kamel says he no longer has a copy of the anonymous referee judgments on the paper, so we don't know why it was rejected. The paper could be criticised for being slight and for not revealing details about its methods of analysis. A reviewer such as Jones would certainly have been aware of Kamel's views about mainstream climate research, which he had called "pseudo-science". He would also have known that its publication in a journal like GRL would have attracted the attention of professional climate sceptics. Nonetheless, the paper raised important questions about the quality of CRU's Siberian data, and was a rare example of someone trying to replicate Jones's analysis. On those grounds alone, some would have recommended its publication.

Kamel's paper admits the discrepancy "does not necessarily mean the CRU surface record for the entire globe is in error". But it argues that the result suggests it "should be checked in more regions and even globally". Jones was not able to comment on the incident.

Critics of Jones such as the prominent sceptical Stephen McIntyre, who runs the Climate Audit blog have long accused him of preventing critical research from having an airing. McIntyre wrote on his web site in December: "CRU's policies of obstructing critical articles in the peer-reviewed literature and withholding data from critics have unfortunately placed issues into play that might otherwise have been settled long ago." He also says obstructing publication undermine claims that all is well in scientific peer review.

Dr Myles Allen, a climate modeller at the University of Oxford and Professor Hans von Storch, a climate scientist at the Institute for Coastal Research, in Geesthacht, Germany signed a joint column in Nature when the email hacking story broke, in which they said that "no grounds have arisen to doubt the validity of the thermometer-based temperature record since it began in about 1850." But that argument is harder to make if such evidence, flawed though it might be, is actively being kept out of the journals.

In another email exchange CRU scientist Dr Keith Briffa initiates what looks like an attempt to have a paper rejected. In June 2003, as an editor of an unnamed journal, Briffa emailed fellow tree-ring researcher Edward Cook, a researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, saying: "Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting [an unnamed paper] – to ­support Dave Stahle's and really as soon as you can. Please."

Stahle is a tree-ring professor from the University of Arkansas. This request appears to subvert the convention that reviewers should be both independent and anonymous.

Cook replied later that day: "OK, today. Promise. Now, something to ask from you." The favour was to provide some data to help Cook review a paper that attacked his own tree-ring work. "If published as is, this paper could really do some damage," he said. "It won't be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically, but it suffers from the classic problem of pointing out theoretical deficiencies, without showing that their improved [inverse regression] method is actually better in a practical sense."

Briffa was unable to comment. Cook told the Guardian: "These emails are from a long time ago and the details are not ­terribly fresh in my mind."

Jones did not restrict his harsh criticism of papers he saw as flawed to pre-publication reviews. He and Mann also had a reputation for harsh criticism of journals that published papers they disagreed with.

In March 2003, Mann discussed encouraging colleagues to "no longer submit [papers] to, or cite papers in" Climate Research.He was angry about that journal's publication of a series of sceptical papers "that couldn't get published in a reputable journal", according to Mann. His anger at the journal had evidently been building for some time, but was focused in 2003 on a paper published in January that year and written by the Harvard astrophysicists Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas. The pair claimed that Mann's famous hockey stick graph of global temperatures over the past 1,000 years was wrong. After analysing 240 studies of past temperatures from tree rings and other sources, they said "the 20th century is neither the warmest century over the last 1,000 years, nor is it the most extreme". It could have been warmer a thousand years before, they suggested.

Harvard press-released the paper under the headline "20th century climate not so hot", which would have pleased lobbyists against the climate change consensus from the American Petroleum Institute and George C Marshall Institute, both of which had helped pay for the research. Mann told me at the time the paper was "absurd, almost laughable". He said Soon and Baliunas made no attempt in the paper to show whether the warmth they found at different places and times round the world in past eras was contemporaneous in the way current global warming is. If they were just one-off scattered warm events they did not demonstrate any kind of warm era at all. Soon did not respond to Guardian requests to discuss the paper.

The emails show Mann debating with others what he should do. In March 2003, he told Jones: "I believed our only choice was to ignore this paper. They've already achieved what they wanted – the claim of a peer-reviewed paper. There is nothing we can do about that now, but the last thing we want to do is bring attention to this paper"

But Jones told Mann: "I think the sceptics will use this paper to their own ends and it will set [the field of paleoclimate research] back a number of years if it goes unchallenged." He was right. The Soon and Baliunas paper was later read into the Senate record and taken up by the Bush administration, which attempted to get it cited in a report from the Environmental Protection Agency against the wishes of the report's authors.

Persuaded that the paper could not be ignored, Mann assembled a group of colleagues to review it. The group included regular CRU emailers Jones, Dr Keith Briffa, Dr Tom Wigley and Dr Kevin Trenberth. They sent their findings to the journal's editorial board, arguing that Soon's study was little more than anecdote. It had cherry-picked data showing warm periods in different places over several centuries and had provided no evidence that they demonstrated any overall warming of the kind seen in the 20th century.

The emails reveal that when the journal failed to disown the paper, the scientists figured a "coup" had taken place, and that one editor in particular, a New Zealander called Chris de Freitas, was fast-tracking sceptical papers on to its pages. Mann saw an irony in what had happened. "This was the danger of always criticising the sceptics for not publishing in the peer-reviewed literature. Obviously, they found a solution to that – take over a journal." But Mann had a solution. "I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. ­Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues … to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board."

Was this improper pressure? Bloggers responding to the leaking of these emails believe so. Mann denies wanting to "stifle legitimate sceptical views". He maintains that he merely wanted to uphold scientific standards. "Please understand the context of this," he told the Guardian after the scandal broke. "This was in response to a very specific, particularly egregious incident in which one editor of the journal was ­letting in a paper that clearly did not meet the standards of quality for the journal."

Naturally de Freitas defends his actions during the incident. "I was never ever found to have done anything wrong, even in the rumpus over the Soon and Baliunas paper. All accusations against me were fully investigated and my performance as editor of this journal was shown to be flawless."

But many on the 10-man editorial board agreed with Mann. There was a revolt. Their chief editor von Storch wrote an editorial saying the Soon paper shouldn't have appeared because of "severe methodological flaws". After their publisher Otto Kinne refused to publish the editorial, von Storch and four other board members resigned in protest. Subsequently Kinne himself admitted that publication had been an error and promised to strengthen the peer review process. Mann had won his argument.

Sceptical climatologist and Cato Institute fellow Pat Michaels alleged in the Wall Street Journal in December last year that the resignations by von Storch and his colleagues were a counter-coup initiated by Mann and Jones. This is vehemently denied by von Storch. While one of the editors who resigned was a colleague of Jones at CRU, von Storch had a track record of independence. If anything, he was regarded as a moderate sceptic. Certainly, he had annoyed both mainstream climate scientists and sceptics.

Also writing in the Wall Street Journal in December, he said: "I am in the pocket of neither Exxon nor Greenpeace, and for this I come under fire from both sides – the sceptics and alarmists – who have fiercely opposing views but are otherwise siblings in their methods and contempt ... I left the post [as chief editor of Climate Research] with no outside pressure, because of insufficient quality control on a bad paper – a sceptic's paper, at that."

The bad blood over this paper lingered. A year later, in July 2004, Jones wrote an email to Mann about two papers recently published in Climate Research – the Soon and Baliunas paper and another he ­identified as by "MM". This was almost certainly a paper from the Canadian economist Ross McKitrick and Michaels that returned to an old sceptics' theme. It claimed to find urbanisation dominating global warming trends on land. Jones called it "garbage".

More damagingly, he added in an email to Mann with the subject line "HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL": "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer review literature is!"

This has, rightly, become one of the most famous of the emails. And for once, it means what it seems to mean. Jones and Trenberth, of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, had recently become joint lead authors for a key chapter in the next IPCC assessment report, called AR4.......

==

==

Cato Institute: Three Op-Eds. The Wall Street Journal published three climate- or energy-related op-eds by members of the Cato Institute, which was co-founded by the oil billionaire Koch brothers and has received millions of dollars from the Koch family. One of the op-eds falsely attacked attorneys general investigations of Exxon, and the other two op-eds promoted climate science denial. In an August 21 op-ed, Cato's Elizabeth Price Foley wrongly claimed that a group of attorneys general, who have committed to holding fossil fuel companies -- including Exxon -- accountable if they obfuscated climate change research in order to protect their financial interests, had pledged to take action against "climate wrongthink."

A March 4, 2015, op-ed byCato's Richard Lindzen questioned “the popular alarm over allegedly man-made global warming,” and criticized world leaders for “demonizing carbon dioxide.” And a January 24 piece byCato's Patrick Michaels, titled “The Climate Snow Job,” was critiqued by Climate Feedback, an organization that publishes scientists’ assessments of the accuracy of news articles and opinion pieces. Ten scientists analyzed the op-ed and in their summary wrote, “Most of the article is devoted to casting doubt over the accuracy of the global temperature record. The author uses detailed technical descriptions to distract readers from the inaccuracies of the article, which involve cherry-picking data to support multiple unsubstantiated and discredited claims.” They rated its scientific credibility to be “low" to "very low.” *Media Matters*, [Frequent Misinformers Spreadsheet,Climate Denial/Misinformation Spreadsheet, 7/31/15; Florida International University Law School, accessed9/1/16; InsideClimate News, 3/30/16; Climate Feedback, 1/24/16]

==

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-:{climate-snow-job:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:-1453664732

East Coast blizzard howling, global temperatures peaking, the desert Southwest flooding, drought-stricken California drying up—surely there’s a common thread tying together this “extreme” weather. There is. But it has little to do with what recent headlines have been saying about the hottest year ever. It is called business as usual.

Surface temperatures are indeed increasing slightly: They’ve been going up, in fits and starts, for more than 150 years, or since a miserably cold and pestilential period known as the Little Ice Age. Before carbon dioxide from economic activity could have warmed us up, temperatures rose three-quarters of a degree Fahrenheit between 1910 and World War II. They then cooled down a bit, only to warm again from the mid-1970s to the late ’90s, about the same amount as earlier in the century.

Whether temperatures have warmed much since then depends on what you look at. Until last June, most scientists acknowledged that warming reached a peak in the late 1990s, and since then had plateaued in a “hiatus.” There are about 60 different explanations for this in the refereed literature.

That changed last summer, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) decided to overhaul its data, throwing out satellite-sensed sea-surface temperatures since the late 1970s and instead relying on, among other sources, readings taken from the cooling-water-intake tubes of oceangoing vessels. The scientific literature is replete with articles about the large measurement errors that accrue in this data owing to the fact that a ship’s infrastructure conducts heat, absorbs a tremendous amount of the sun’s energy, and vessels’ intake tubes are at different ocean depths. See, for instance, John J. Kennedy’s “A review of uncertainty in in situ measurements and data sets of sea surface temperature,” published Jan. 24, 2014, by the journal Reviews of Geophysics.

NOAA’s alteration of its measurement standard and other changes produced a result that could have been predicted: a marginally significant warming trend in the data over the past several years, erasing the temperature plateau that vexed climate alarmists have found difficult to explain. Yet the increase remains far below what had been expected.

It is nonetheless true that 2015 shows the highest average surface temperature in the 160-year global history since reliable records started being available, with or without the “hiatus.” But that is also not very surprising. Early in 2015, a massive El Niño broke out. These quasiperiodic reversals of Pacific trade winds and deep-ocean currents are well-documented but poorly understood. They suppress the normally massive upwelling of cold water off South America that spreads across the ocean (and is the reason that Lima may be the most pleasant equatorial city on the planet). The Pacific reversal releases massive amounts of heat, and therefore surface temperature spikes. El Niño years in a warm plateau usually set a global-temperature record. What happened this year also happened with the last big one, in 1998.

Global average surface temperature in 2015 popped up by a bit more than a quarter of a degree Fahrenheit compared with the previous year. In 1998 the temperature rose by slightly less than a quarter-degree from 1997.

When the Pacific circulation returns to its more customary mode, all that suppressed cold water will surge to the surface with a vengeance, and global temperatures will drop. Temperatures in 1999 were nearly three-tenths of a degree lower than in 1998, and a similar change should occur this time around, though it might not fit so neatly into a calendar year. Often the compensatory cooling, known as La Niña, is larger than the El Niño warming.

There are two real concerns about warming, neither of which has anything to do with the El Niño-enhanced recent peak. How much more is the world likely to warm as civilization continues to exhale carbon dioxide, and does warming make the weather more “extreme,” which means more costly?

Instead of relying on debatable surface-temperature information, consider instead readings in the free atmosphere (technically, the lower troposphere) taken by two independent sensors: satellite sounders and weather balloons. As has been shown repeatedly by University of Alabama climate scientist John Christy, since late 1978 (when the satellite record begins), the rate of warming in the satellite-sensed data is barely a third of what it was supposed to have been, according to the large family of global climate models now in existence. Balloon data, averaged over the four extant data sets, shows the same.

It is therefore probably prudent to cut by 50% the modeled temperature forecasts for the rest of this century. Doing so would mean that the world—without any political effort at all—won’t warm by the dreaded 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 that the United Nations regards as the climate apocalypse.

The notion that world-wide weather is becoming more extreme is just that: a notion, or a testable hypothesis. As data from the world’s biggest reinsurer, Munich Re, and University of Colorado environmental-studies professor Roger Pielke Jr. have shown, weather-related losses haven’t increased at all over the past quarter-century. In fact, the trend, while not statistically significant, is downward. Last year showed the second-smallest weather-related loss of Global World Productivity, or GWP, in the entire record.

Without El Niño, temperatures in 2015 would have been typical of the post-1998 regime. And, even with El Niño, the effect those temperatures had on the global economy was de minimis.

Mr. Michaels, a climatologist, is the director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute.

==

mann bk: ch 14 climategate

11/17/09 bs pr sez "random" but targeted scrape of names: MM santer, briffa, trenberth, jones

1st www link by McI (hack from N Am via turkey), then saudi (used at Cop 15) --> USSR server

"smoking gun" ebell --> meme ~ AGW

alo pat michaels "gate-keeper" final nail in coffin)

--> inhohe igloo bs, Palin WaP

==

obamunism Mo d 253

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Patrick_J._Michaels

cv http://democrats.energycommerce.house.gov/sites/default/files/documents/CV-Michaels-2009-2-12.pdf

 ---

Center for the Study of Science

Federal government involvement in science, particularly physical science, grew during World War II through the Office of Scientific Research and Development, created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941. After the war the OSRD ended; but Vannevar Bush, who oversaw the Manhattan Project and the OSRD, strongly advocated the creation of a peacetime agency to fund and promote scientific R&D, as well as to heavily involve the federal government in research and educational funding for science activities in academia. The result was the establishment of the National Science Foundation, which was soon followed by the development of scientific programs in several cabinet departments. The ensuing government presence creates the potential for politicization by officials with policy goals. The Center for the Study of Science, established by the Cato Institute in 2012, is dedicated to exploring this process. The Cato Institute, which does not accept government funding, has the independence to shine light on this little-studied issue.[odd so late?  not needed when b43 suppressed sci?]

==

The World Climate Report

In Dr. Soon’s Curriculum Vitae in 2005 he lists himself as a “contributing editor” to the World Climate Report, a blog run by prominent climate change skeptic Patrick Michaels, published by his company, New Hope Environmental Services. New Hopehas been described as a PR company and, while secretive about its funding sources, it received support from the “non-profit fuel supply co-operative” Western Fuels Association which supports coal mining in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and the railroads that transport that coal to the powerplants built to burn it. Between 1997 and 2000, Dr. Soon wrote 21 articles for the website, mostly co-written with Sallie Baliunas.  CRYPTO

Western Fuels itself funded and controlled another similar group called the “Greening Earth Society” which ran a newsletter called “World Climate Alert.” According to his CV, Dr. Soon wrote at least three articles for World Climate Alert.

mojo climategate booster:

Many of the think tanks that seized upon the scandal in weeks that followed were the same anti-regulation, oil-coated outlets that have been promoting climate change denial for years. The Cato Institute, which has received funding from oil giants Koch Industries and ExxonMobil, was a key player—Cato senior fellow Patrick Michaels got prime real estate in the *New York Times* [96], on the opinion pages of the *Wall Street Journal* [106], and onCNN's *Anderson Cooper 360* [107]. In a January 2010 newsletter, Cato boasted [108] that its senior fellow was at the "center of the 'Climategate' controversy."

Sr Fellow at cato

Pat Michaels, Virginia “State Climatologist”? A critical perspective on the issues

Posted on October 1, 2006 by Joseph A. Davis

The Washington Post ran an article on September 17 on the controversy over whether Pat Michaels, long-time voice of the global warming denial machine, was entitled to continue to identify himself as the Virginia State Climatologist. Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine doesn’t want Michaels appearing to speak for the state on global warming issues.  This guest contribution provides a critical perspective that goes beyond what was developed in the Post’s coverage—about the legitimacy of Michaels’ designation as state climatologist, about Michaels’ funding sources and think tank affiliation, and about the meaning of “climatologist” in the contemporary scientific context.

An environmental journalist writes:

GIVING PAT MICHAELS A PASS

I’m a huge fan and loyal reader of the Washington Post‘s Juliet Eilperin and David Farenthold, and think the world of most of their work, but I was disappointed in their Sept. 17, 2006, story about Patrick J. Michaels, “Climatologist Draws Heat From Critics.”

The problems began before the first sentence was over—as the story began by identifying Michaels as “the Virginia state climatologist”—when one of the big disputes discussed in the story was whether Michaels can, in fact, legitimately be called the Virginia state climatologist. By stating that without any...http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2006/10/01/pat-michaels-virginia-state-climatologist-a-critical-perspective-on-the-issues/

carbon war; paid by Cyprus Minerals, largest funder of wise use

Patrick J. Michaels

From SourceWatch

Patrick J. Michaels (±1942- ), also known as Pat Michaels, is a global warming skeptic who argues that global warming models are fatally flawed and, in any event, we should take no action because new technologies will soon replace those that emit greenhouse gases.

Michaels is Editor of the *World Climate Report*, a blog published by New Hope Environmental Services, "an advocacy science consulting firm"[1]^(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Patrick_J._Michaels#cite_note-0) he founded and runs. In an affidavit in a Vermont court case, Michaels described the "mission" of the firm as being to "publicize findings on climate change and scientific and social perspectives that may not otherwise appear in the popular literature or media. This entails both response research and public commentary."[2]^(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Patrick_J._Michaels#cite_note-PMAffadavit-1) In effect, New Hope Environmental Services is a PR firm.[//STATS?]

Michaels' firm does not disclose who its clients are, but leaked documents have revealed that several were power utilities which operate coal power stations. On a 2007 academic CV, Michaels disclosed that prior to creating his firm he had received funding from the Edison Electric Institute and the Western Fuels Association. He has also been a frequent speaker with leading coal and energy companies as well as coal and other industry lobby groups.[3]

Michaels is also associated with a number of think tanks and advocacy groups which dispute global warming. He is a Visiting Scientist with the George C. Marshall Institute, a Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies with the Cato Institute[4]^(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Patrick_J._Michaels#cite_note-3) and a member of the Advisory Board of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.[5]^(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Patrick_J._Michaels#cite_note-CFACT-4)

...

update:

Patrick J. Michaels (±1942- ), also known as Pat Michaels, is a largely oil-funded global warming skeptic who argues that global warming models are fatally flawed and, in any event, we should take no action because new technologies will soon replace those that emit greenhouse gases. Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia served as an Expert Reviewer to Working Group I of the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC[1].

Contents[hide]

New Hope Environmental Services "advocacy science" consulting firm

Michaels is Editor of the World Climate Report, a blog published by the "advocacy science consulting firm" New Hope Environmental Services[2], which he founded and runs.

Mission

In an affidavit in a Vermont court case, Michaels described his firm's "mission" as being to "publicize findings on climate change and scientific and social perspectives that may not otherwise appear in the popular literature or media. This entails both response research and public commentary."[3] In effect, New Hope Environmental Services is a PR firm.

Clientele

Michaels' firm does not disclose who its clients are, but leaked documents have revealed that several were power utilities which operate coal power stations. On a 2007 academic CV, Michaels disclosed that prior to creating his firm he had received funding from the Edison Electric Institute and the Western Fuels Association. He has also been a frequent speaker with leading coal and energy companies as well as coal and other industry lobby groups.[4]

(For more information, see Patrick J. Michaels - career history and Patrick J. Michaels - funding.)

Other affiliations

Marshall, Cato, CFACT, ACSH

Michaels is also associated with a number of think tanks and advocacy groups which dispute global warming. He is a Visiting Scientist with the George C. Marshall Institute, a Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies with the Cato Institute[5] and a member of the Advisory Board of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.[6]

Michaels is also a Scientific Advisor of the American Council on Science and Health[7].

Past affiliations - TASSC, Greening Earth Society

Michaels was a "supporter" of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, an industry-funded PR front group created in 1993 and run by the APCO Worldwide public relations firm. It worked to hang the label of "junk science" on environmentalists. The group is now defunct.[8]

Between December 1998[9] and September 2001[10] he was listed as a "Scientific Advisor" to the Greening Earth Society, a group that was funded and controlled by the Western Fuels Association (WFA), an association of coal-burning utility companies. WFA founded the group in 1997, according to an archived version of its website, "as a vehicle for advocacy on climate change, the environmental impact of CO2, and fossil fuel use."[11]

List by date

Much of this duplicates the text above.

Education

Michaels completed a bachelors degree in biological sciences degree in 1971 and a Masters degree in Biology in 1975 at the University of Chicago. He completed a Ph.D. in Ecological Climatology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1979 on the topic of "Atmospheric Anomalies and Crop Yields in North America".[4]

History - from the Halls of Academe To the Speaker Circuit

See Patrick J. Michaels - career history.

Funding - including varying (year&content) statements by Michaels re source of funding

See Patrick J. Michaels - funding - includes "expert witness" stint for 2007 Vermont auto industry lawsuit

Climate change - playing down importance

Climate views

In August 2004, Michaels told Business Week "We know how much the planet is going to warm. It is a small amount, and we can't do anything about it."[13]

In a July 2010 Wall Street Journal article entitled "The Climategate Whitewash Continues" Pat Michaels said "It's impossible to find anything wrong if you really aren't looking."[14]

In a 1992 opinion column, Michaels wrote of government agencies that they "exist to perpetuate themselves, and to expand their territory and their political influence. Government agencies behave just like people. The agency goals cannot be accomplished without the largesse of Congress. Thus begins a peculiar back-scratching in which political patrons define a particular problem as The Most Important in History. The agency responds by testifying that the end is near unless a few billion is spent pronto-and then it probably will be even worse than we thought.Such issues and constituencies include the ozone "hole" (NASA, NSF, EPA); global warming (NASA, NSF, DOE, EPA); sexually transmitted diseases (National Institutes of Health, NSF); or roughage shortages (NIH, U.S. Department of Agriculture). The list is as infinite as is the predilection for Homo sapiens to have nightmares."[15]

Controversies and criticisms

In 2011: Rep. Waxman calls for inquiry, re possibly misleading testimony on industry ties, funding sources

On January 25, 2011, Rep. Henry Waxman sent a letter to Rep. Fred Upton seeking to call in Michaels for questioning about his science and funding. In the letter, Waxman wrote that Pat Michaels testified before the Energy and Commerce Committee in February 2009 "that widely accepted scientific data had 'overestimated' global warming and that regulation enacted in response to that data could have 'a very counterproductive effect.' Among the scientists who testified before this Committee on the issue of climate change in the last Congress, Pat Michaels was theonly one to dismiss the need to act on climate change ... Dr. Michaels may have provided misleading information about the sources of his funding and his ties to industries opposed to regulation of emissions responsible for climate change."[16]

In 2010: Assertion in climate testimony that humans caused less than half 1950+ warming (termed "not credible")

Climate scientist Benjamin Santernoted that in Michaels' Congressional testimony of November 2010, Michaels had claimed human GHG emissions caused less then half the warming (since 1950), but that this assertion was not credible:[17]

"...Professor Patrick Michaels (in Congressional testimony of November 2010) claimed that human-caused changes in greenhouse gases explain less than half of the post-1950 warming. This claim [by Michaels] is not credible. Michaels arrives at this incorrect result by completely ignoring the cooling effects of sulfate aerosol particles."

In 2009: Cato Institute "just not true" ad, and WSJ Op-ed misdirection re von Storch resignation
Dec. 2009: Wall Street Journal "tip of iceberg" op-ed misrepresentation, and silence

An op-ed[18] by Michaels in the December 17, 2009 Wall Street Journal argued that the climate science consensus was illusory. Among his arguments was a selective recounting of the Climate Research episode[19]: Michaels noted that the "skeptic" paper appeared, whereupon "Messrs. Jones and Mann" threatened to boycott the journal; then half its editorial board resigned. This recounting is chronologically accurate but causally misleading; the resignations had been "because of insufficient quality control on a bad paper — a skeptic’s paper, at that."[20], [19]

Multiple emails sent to Michaels asking whether he'd been aware this was why the editors resigned, before he composed the Wall Street Journal op-ed, did not elicit a response.[21]

March 2009: Cato Institute ad, and RealClimate rebuttal

In March 2009, Michaels, under the auspices of the Cato Institute, circulated a draft advertisement that stated: "Surface temperature changes over the past century have been episodic and modest and there has been no net global warming for over a decade now ... The computer models forecasting rapid temperature change abjectly fail to explain recent climate behavior."[22] The ad statements were analyzed and criticized in detail at the RealClimate blog.[23]

Followup to Cato ad: RealClimate rebuttal of Feb 2009 Michaels testimony

In support of the statements, Chip Knappenberger of World Climate Report referred readers to recent (Feb.) testimony by Michaels to the House of Representatives Energy and Environment sub-committee[24] That too was responded to at length by Gavin Schmidt of RealClimate.org.[25]

In 2006-7: Use of "State Climatologist for Virginia" Title

While Michaels referred to himself as the State Climatologist for Virginia, in August 2006 the Governor, Timothy M. Kaine, clarified that the appointment was one by the University for its accredited climatology office but not an appointment by the state administration. "The Code of Virginia does not provide for the governor to appoint a state climatologist. My office has been unable to find evidence that any governor since 1980 has made such an appointment," Hanley wrote. While Michaels had been appointed to the position in 1980 by the then Governor John Dalton, in 2000the American Association of State Climatologists assumed responsibility for certifying climatologists. "Therefore, it is the prerogative of the university to make that appointment," Hanley wrote.[26]

When Michaels left the university in September 2007, UVa professor James N. Galloway explained that Michaels' "utility industry funding, private research and controversial views on global warming made him a lightning rod on climate change issues," and "left the [climatologist's] office too politicized."[27]

In 2004: Michaels-McKitrick Climate paper basic error

Michaels "co-operated with Ross McKitrick on another paper that managed to "prove" that global warming wasn't happening by mixing up degrees with radians."[28]

In 2000-2003: Gleick and suit threat, Holdren, Social Epistemology, IPCC's Wigley

In 2003 :{**Peter Gleic**k:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:, a conservation analyst and president of the Oakland-based :{Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:, said "Pat Michaels is not one of the nation's leading researchers on climate change. On the contrary, he 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."[29] Michaels responded by threatening to sue. (Michaels had gotten another scientist to withdraw similar remarks.)[30] But Gleick stood by his statement and others have joined him.

Dr. John Holdren of Harvard University told the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee, "Michaels is another of the handful of US climate-change contrarians... 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."[31]

An article in the journal Social Epistemology concluded "...the observations upon which PM [Patrick Michaels] draws his case are not good enough to bear the weight of the argument he wishes to make."[32]

Dr. Tom Wigley, lead author of parts of the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and one of the world's leading climate scientists, was quoted by Ross Gelbspan as stating that "Michaels' statements on [the subject of computer models] are a catalog of misrepresentation and misinterpretation… Many of the supposedly factual statements made in Michaels' testimony are either inaccurate or are seriously misleading."[33]

In 1995: Industry scientists: Michaels' temperature record objections not cogent

An internal 1995 document (pdf) of the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) -- an industry front group that disbanded in 2002 -- reviewed some of the "contrarian" arguments used by Patrick Michaels and other climate change skeptics.[34] The document concluded that:

...contrarian theories raise interesting questions about our total understanding of climate processes, but they do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change. ... Michaels' questions about the temperature record are not convincing arguments against any conclusion that we are currently experiencing warming as the result of greenhouse gas emissions....[And] anomalies in the temperature record [do not] offer a mechanism for off-setting the much larger rise in temperature which might occur if the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases were to double or quadruple."[35]

Books by Michaels

Articles and resources

References

  1. ↑ "[1]"
  2. ↑ "New Hope Environmental Services", New Hope Environmental Services website, accessed May 2009.
  3. ↑ Dr. Patrick J. Michaels, "Affidavit of Dr. Patrick J. Michaels", United States District Court for the District of Vermont, Green Mountain Chrysler et al. v. Crombie et al., Docket No. 02:05-CV-302, July 6, 2007.(Pdf)
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 "Patrick Michaels CV Plain Text File-Climate Change Guide/Skeptics and Contrarians", Society of Environmental Journalists, accessed May 2009.
  5. ↑ "Patrick J. Michaels: Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies", Cato Institute, accessed May 2009.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Advisory Board, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, accessed May 2009.
  7. ↑ No byline (Undated). Scientific Advisors > About ACSH. ACSH. Retrieved on 2010-12-08. “Patrick J. Michaels, Ph.D.; University of Virginia”
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 "Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC) Supporters List", June 30, 1993. Bates Number 2024233615/3618.
  9. ↑ "Scientific Advisers", Greening Earth Society, website archived from December 1998.
  10. ↑ Greening Earth Society, "Scientific Advisers", Greening Earth Society, website archived from September 2001.
  11. ↑ "Join GES", Greening Earth Society website, archived from March 2005.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Tom Hockaday, "International Meeting in Europe on Sound Science", APCO Associates/GCI Group, May 9, 1994.
  13. ↑ John Carey and Sarah R. Shapiro, "Global Warming", Businessweek, August 16, 2004.
  14. ↑ "[2]"
  15. ↑ Patrick J. Michaels, "Give Industry a Bigger Role (Title incomplete", Roanoke Times, December 29, 1992.
  16. ↑ "Rep. Waxman Presses for Inquiry on Global Warming Denier Pat Michaels" HuffPo, Jan. 25, 2011.
  17. ↑ Anna Haynes (2011-05-25). Ben Santer clarifies his "...legitimate debate..." statement from last fall's climate testimony. Warming101 blog. Retrieved on 2011-05-28. “(2011-05-25 correspondence)”
  18. ↑ Pat Michaels (2009-12-17). How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus. WSJ.com. Retrieved on 2011-10-13.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 Clare Goodess (2003-11). Stormy Times for Climate Research. SGR. Retrieved on 2009-12-26. “...Hans von Storch and I were also aware of three earlier Climate Research papers about which people had raised concerns over the review process. In all these cases, de Freitas had had editorial responsibility.”
  20. ↑ Things Break (pseudonym) (2009-12-18). Pat Michaels lying in the Wall Street Journal. The Way Things Break. Retrieved on 2011-10-13.
  21. ↑ Emails from ahaynes, 2009 and 2010
  22. ↑ Cato Institute, "With all due respect Mr.President, that is not true.", Real Climate, March 2009.
  23. ↑ "With all due respect…", RealClimate, March 24, 2009.
  24. ↑ "Testimony of Patrick J. Michaels", House of Representatives Subcommittee on Energy and Environment of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, February 12, 2009.
  25. ↑ Gavin Schmidt, "Michaels’ new graph", RealClimate, March 26, 2009.
  26. ↑ Aaron Kessler, State: Climatologist appointed by university: Michaels no longer Virginia official", Daily Progress, August 19, 2006. (Scroll down).
  27. ↑ "Michaels Out As Virginia State Climatologist: Controversial state climatologist steps down", Newport News (Va.) Daily Press, September 27, 2007. (This is an Associated Press story.)
  28. ↑ Tim Lambert, "McKitrick screws up yet again", Deltoid, August 26, 2004.
  29. ↑ Seth Slabaugh, "Global warming speaker under fire", Star Press (Muncie, IN), November 18, 2003.
  30. ↑ "Science, Climate Change, and Censorship: The Pacific Institute, Patrick Michaels, and the science of climate change", Pacific Institute, undated but approx late 2003.
  31. ↑ John Holdren, "The Shaky Science Behind the Climate Change Sense of the Congress Resolution", US Senate Republican Policy Committee, June 2, 2003.
  32. ↑ Simon Shackley, "Commentary on the debate between James Hansen and Patrick Michaels, November 1998", Social Epistemology, 2000, vol. 14, nos. 2/3, pages 181–186.
  33. ↑ Ross Gelbspan, "Global Warmers", The Nation, March 20, 2001.
  34. ↑ Andrew C. Revkin, "Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate", New York Times, April 23, 2009.
  35. ↑ Global Climate Coalition, "Primer on Climate Change Science· Final Draft", January 18, 1996, pages 16-17.

Related SourceWatch articles

External resources

External articles

By Michaels

See Patrick J. Michaels - his articles and papers for articles and papers by Pat Michaels.

See Patrick J. Michaels - his testimony for testimony by Pat Michaels.

General articles

Categories: Climate change | Coal Issues | Energy | Leipzig Declaration signers | Global warming skeptics | Science | Secrecy | Public relations professionals | Speaker at the Heartland Institute's Third International Conference on Climate Change

1992: Chamber Sponsors Global Warming Denier Pat Michaels To ‘Refute The Global Warming Warnings.’ “Bankrolled partly by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Global Climate Coalition, a group of manufacturers fearful of new environmental regulations, Patrick Michaels and Washington, D.C., attorney Eugene M. Trisko have been traveling cross-country to refute the global warming warnings from environmentalists.” [Chicago Sun-Times, 5/13/1992]

8/14

www.cato.org/people/patrick-michaels

Cato Institute

:{:{Patrick:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: J. :{Michaels:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is the director of the Center for the Study of Science at the :{Cato:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:Institute. :{Michaels:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is a past president of the American Association of State ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Michaels

Wikipedia

:{:{Patrick:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: J. :{Michaels:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, :{Cato:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Institute ... and Economic Development at George Mason University, and a senior fellow in environmental studies at the :{Cato:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Institute.:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Education - ‎Views on climate change - ‎Advocacy - ‎Funding from energy or fossil ...

www.skepticalscience.com/patrick-michaels-history-gettin...

Skeptical Science

Jul 13, 2013 - A review of claims made by the Cato Institute's Patrick Michaels over the last quarter century shows that he has repeatedly been proven wrong ...

mediamatters.org/.../patrick-michaels-catos.../...

Media Matters for America

:{Jul 10, 2013 - A review of claims made by the :{Cato:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Institute's :{Patrick Michaels:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: over the last ... In a :{Cato:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: post that was later published as a Washington Times ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmichaels/

Forbes

:{:{Patrick Michaels:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:' stories. ... Log in. :{Patrick Michaels:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: ... I am Director of the Center for the Study of Science at the :{Cato:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Institute and a senior fellow in research and  ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

www.cato-unbound.org/contributors/patrick-j-michaels

:{:{Patrick:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: J. :{Michaels:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is the director of the Center for the Study of Science at the :{Cato:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:Institute. :{Michaels:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is a past president of the American Association of State ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

wattsupwiththat.com/tag/patrick-michaels/

Watts Up With That?

by Anthony Watts - Dec 18, 2013 - Climate History: Cato Boffins Discovered “Anti-information” By Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. “Chip” Knappenberger While doing some  ...

thinkprogress.org/.../patrick-michaels-and-the-cato-institut...

ThinkProgress

:{:{Pat Michaels:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: And :{Cato:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Institute Unwittingly Accept Climate Threat. by Climate Guest Contributor Posted on July 22, 2012 at 9:39 am Updated: July 22, 2012 at ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

www.climatedepot.com/.../listen-now-climatologist-dr-patr...

Climate Depot

:{Oct 11, 2013 - Dr. :{Michaels:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is Director of the Center for the Study of Science at the:{Cato:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Institute. He taught Environmental Science for 30 years at University of  ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Patrick_J._Michaels

:{Jump to :(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:Followup to **Cato** ad: RealClimate rebuttal of Feb 2009 **...** - In support of the statements, Chip Knappenberger of World Climate Report ...

cato bs

trick J. Michaels is the director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute. Michaels is a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. He was a research professor of Environmental Sciences at University of Virginia for thirty years. Michaels was a contributing author and is a reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. His writing has beenpublished in the major scientific journals, includingClimate Research, Climatic Change, Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Climate, Nature, and Science, as well as in popular serials worldwide. He is the author or editor of six books on climate and its impact, and he was an author of theclimate “paper of the year” awarded by the Association of American Geographers in 2004. He has appeared on most of the worldwide major media. Michaels holds A.B. and S.M. degrees in biological sciences and plant ecology from the University of Chicago, and he received a Ph.D. in ecological climatology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1979.

eg

Our Weird Energy Politics

Patrick J. Michaels in National Review (Online)

When it comes to energy fecklessness, Barack Obama’s policies are in Jimmy Carter’s league.

Should the U.S. Take the Lead on Climate Change Policies?

Paul C. "Chip" Knappenberger and Patrick J. Michaels

Should the United States “take the lead” on climate change, an issue that science says is overblown and one that big, developing nations surely will not embrace (or, at least, not in a meaningful way)? Probaby not!

Commentary

Our Weird Energy Politics

National Review (Online). August 4, 2014.

The Threat to the Scientific Method

Townhall. July 21, 2014.

The Forecast OnMcAuliffe’sRevived Climate Commission

Daily Caller. July 3, 2014.

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Should the U.S. Take the Lead on Climate Change Policies?

August 1, 2014.

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July 22, 2014.

Influencing Climate Policy on the Back of a Lame Horse

July 11, 2014.

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Cato Studies

Is the Sky Really Falling? A Review of RecentGlobal Warming Scare Stories

Policy Analysis No. 576. August 23, 2006.

Review of the 2001 U.S. Climate Action Report

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Policy Analysis No. 329. December 31, 1998.

Miffed Climatologists want UW-Madison to Revoke Global Warming Skeptic's PhD

1 Comments | Posted in News, mi investigations | By Staff | Posted December 1, 2009 9:22 AM

MacIver News Service

"Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I'll be tempted to beat the crap out of him." -Ben Santer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Some prominent Climatologists who subscribe to the theory of man-made global warming want the University of Wisconsin to consider revoking Patrick Michaels' Doctorate, according to leaked emails uncovered as part of the brewing 'climategate' scandal.

Who is Patrick Michaels?

Michaels received his PhD in ecological climatology from UW-Madison in 1979 after he earned his A.B. and S.M. degrees in biological sciences and plant ecology from the University of Chicago.  Since then he's served as a climatologist for the state of Virginia, a professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, and was a contributing author and reviewer of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  He's currently a senior fellow at the CATO Institute and is a Distinguished Senior Fellow in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University.

According to his official biography, Michaels' writing has been published in the major scientific journals, including Climate Research, Climatic Change, Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Climate,Nature, and Science, as well as in newspapers such as The Washington Post, Washington Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Houston Chronicle,and Journal of Commerce.He was an author of the climate "paper of the year" awarded by the Association of American Geographers in 2004.

With all these bona fides, why would his peers contemplate waging a campaign to undermine his credibility?

Michaels is also a global warming skeptic.

Questioning Man Made Global Warming

In September, he wrote an article for National Review accusing Phil Jones, a climatologist at the United Kingdom's University of East Anglia, and his colleagues of losing or destroying surface temperature data they used to develop their theories.  You can read the whole article by clickinghere.

The Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia explained on their website "Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data."

That data was incorporated into a report by the IPCC in the 1990s, which in turn was used by the EPA in drafting its "Endangerment Findings."  The endangerment findings determined that greenhouse gases are at unprecedented levels and are endangering the health and welfare of the public.

Now, Michaels and the Competitive Enterprise Institute are petitioning the EPA to reopen the public comment period, because the data supporting the findings are unreliable.

That allegation did not sit well with Phil Jones and his colleagues.

Ben Santer, a climatologist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told  Jones in an email on October 9, 2009 "I'm really sorry that you have to go through all this stuff, Phil. Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I'll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted."

Long-running feud

In an interview with the MacIver Institute on Tuesday, Michaels said that was not the first time Santer had threatened him with bodily harm.  Michaels explained he and Santer have been critical of each other since the mid-1990s.

The feud dates back to at least 1996 when Santer, Jones and others published a paper in the academic journal Natureentitled "A Search For Human Influences On The Thermal Structure Of The Atmosphere."  The authors believed it was supposed to settle the global warming debate once and for all.

Michaels said "It was a blatant attempt to manipulate public opinion." He went on to write an article for Nature about the questionable scientific practices behind Santer and Jones' work.

It is clear Jones, Santer and others continue to hold a grudge against Michaels. Examples of that grudge can be found in emails leaked from the University of East Anglia.  On October 8, 2009, Santer emailed Rick Piltz, director of Climate Science Watch, questioning Michaels' own research methods.

Santer wrote "I'm sure that Pat Michaels does not have the primary source data used in his Ph.D. thesis. Perhaps one of us should request the datasets used in Michaels' Ph.D. work, and then ask the University of Wisconsin to withdraw Michaels' Ph.D. if he fails to produce every dataset and computer program used in the course of his thesis research."

Michaels told the MacIver Institute "The funny thing is I could reproduce every data set.  It's not that complicated."

As the recently-revealed email conversations continued, Santer defended the reliability of the IPCC study.

"The integrity and reliability of this story does NOT rest on a single observational dataset, as Michaels and the CEI incorrectly claim," Santer emailed.  "Michaels should and does know better. I can only conclude from his behavior - and from his participation in this legal action - that he is being intentionally dishonest."

Defending Jones, Santer wrote "The sad thing here is that Phil Jones is one of the true gentlemen of our field. I have known Phil for most of my scientific career. He is the antithesis of the secretive, 'data destroying' character the CEI and Michaels are trying to portray to the outside world."

The UW Connection

But the issue of Michaels' PhD from the University of Wisconsin continued to come up in subsequent emails. The next week, emails from other climatologists continued to speculate about the possibility of revoking Michaels' Doctorate.

One email asked "Perhaps the University of Wisconsin ought to open up a public comment period to decide whether Pat Michaels' PhD needs re-assessing?"

This week the MacIver Institute filed an open records request with the University of Wisconsin to see if any formal effort against Michaels was undertaken.

In response, John C. Dowling UW's Senior University Legal Counsel, wrote, "According to the current Chair of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, there has been no correspondence concerning the Ph.D. granted to Patrick Michael in 1979."

The intrigue continues, however. Just today it was reported that Phil Jones has stepped down from his position at the University of East Anglia, pending the results of an investigation of allegations, stemming from the leaked emails, that he overstated case for man-made global warming.

The MacIver Institute will continue to report on developments of this story, including other Wisconsin connections to the controversy.

By Bill Osmulski

MacIver News Service

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