Most Credible Climate Skeptic Not So Credible After AllBy Kate Sheppard
<http://motherjones.com/authors/kate-sheppard> | Fri Feb. 26, 2010
Patrick Michaels has more credibility than your average climate
skeptic. Unlike some of the kookier characters that populate the small
world of climate denialistslike Lord Christopher Monckton
<http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/12/dirty-dozen-climate-change-d\
enial-10-lord-christopher-monckton> , a sometime adviser to Margaret
Thatcher who claims that "We are a carbon-starved planet," or H.
Leighton Steward, a retired oil executive and author of a best-selling
diet book who argues
<http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/12/dirty-dozen-climate-change-d\
enial-07-plants-need-c02> that carbon dioxide is "green"Michaels
is actually a bona fide climate scientist. As such, he's often quoted by
reporters as a reasonable expert who argues that global warming has been
overhyped.
But what Michaels doesn't mention in his frequent media appearances is
his history of receiving money from big polluters.
Michaels, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, has some
impressive-sounding credentials. He has a PhD in ecological climatology
and is a senior fellow in the School of Public Policy at George Mason
University. He's a past president of the American Association of State
Climatologists and a former program chair for the Committee on Applied
Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. He regularly touts
his work as a contributing author and reviewer of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change reports. (Almost every climate scientist in the
world has at some point contributed to or reviewed an IPCC study.)
Unlike climate skeptics who implausibly claim that there's no such thing
as global warming, Michaels accepts that it's happening, but downplays
the severity of the problem and the role that human activity plays in
the phenomenon.
With climate science increasingly under siege, Michaels has been getting
plenty of airtime lately. Following reports of errors and sloppy
research procedures with the reports produced by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change
<http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2010/02/more-problems-ipcc> ,
Michaels featured prominently in a CBS News report
<http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6175293n&tag=related;photovideo>
last month, claiming that there is "no doubt the trust in the UN panel
has been undermined."
And after hacked emails
<http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/11/climategate> revealed that a
group of climate scientists had tried to block skeptical views from
academic papers and journals, Michaels appeared on CNN's Anderson Cooper
360 to debate Bill Nye (the "Science Guy"). Michaels said he was
"troubled" that scientists at the heart of the controversy might have
tried "to hide things" from Freedom of Information Act requests.
He was also featured prominently in a New York Times piece
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/science/earth/21climate.html>
calling the controversy "a mushroom cloud" for climate science, and
appeared several times in the Wall Street Journal complaining
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125883405294859215.html> that
scientists said mean things about him
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527487043983045745982304260372\
44.html> in the emails. (It's worth emphasizing that while the incident
revealed scientists behaving unprofessionally, nothing in the emails
undermined the underlying science of climate change.)
But Michaels' credibility on climate is called into question by a trove
of documents from a 2007 court case that attracted almost no scrutiny at
the time. Those documents show that Michaels has financial ties to big
energy intereststies that he's worked hard to keep secret. Here's
the back story:
Several years ago, the auto industry launched a salvo of lawsuits
challenging the tougher vehicle emissions standards that had been
introduced in many states. In 2007, Michaels was scheduled to appear as
an expert witness on behalf of a challenge by Green Mountain
Chrysler-Plymouth-Dodge and the Association of International Automobile
Manufacturers to emissions standards in Vermont.
The auto industry's lawyers planned to put Michaels on the stand as an
expert witness who would question the scientific finding that greenhouse
gas emissions are warming the planet. But it soon became clear that
lawyers defending Vermont's law were going to ask Michaels about the
clients of his "advocacy science consulting firm," New Hope
Environmental Services <http://www.nhes.com/> .
Michaels had never made a list of his clients public, and he refused to
do so now, arguing that it was a confidential matter. The judge
disagreed, and ruled that Michaels' clients were a "viable area of cross
examination." "I understand that maybe it's a little embarrassing," said
Judge William K. Sessions III. "[But] it's not highly confidential
information."
In a rare move, the auto dealers pulled Michaels off their witness list.
In an affidavit <http://motherjones.com/files/michaelsaf.pdf> [PDF],
Michaels stated that New Hope was his primary source of income, and
being forced to reveal its clients would "imperil my livelihood." He
emphasized that the "sole reason" he did not testify was "concern that
my trial testimony would result in the loss of confidentiality for the
New Hope information."
The auto lawyers were "desperate to shield who Pat Michaels makes his
money from," David Bookbinder, chief climate counsel for the Sierra Club
and one of the lawyers for the state in the case. "It's beyond
unrealistic," said Bookbinder. "It's like saying in a speeding case that
you're not able to ask about how fast someone was going."
As it turned out, Michaels' attempt to keep his client list secret
wasn't entirely successful. The court documents reveal
<http://motherjones.com/files/PMtranscript.pdf> that lawyers for the
defense saw records revealing that Michaels had received money from at
least one very large energy company.
In addition, Greenpeace recently obtained an older copy of Michaels'
curriculum vitae <http://motherjones.com/files/Michaels.cv_.pdf> via a
Freedom of Information Act request that shows that the Western Fuels
Association, a coal and fuel-transportation business group, gave him a
$63,000 grant in the early 1990s for "research on global climatic
change."
He also received $25,000 from the Edison Electric Institute, an
association of electric utilities, from 1992-95 for "literature review
of climate change and updates."
And a 2006 leaked industry memo
<http://www.desmogblog.com/vampire-memo-reveals-coal-industry-plan-for-m\
assive-propaganda-blitz> revealed that he received $100,000 in funding
from the Intermountain Rural Electric Association to fund climate denial
campaigning around the time of the release of An Inconvenient Truth.
Reporter Ross Gelbspan wrote in his 1998 book The Heat is On, one of the
earliest works documenting industry funding for climate change
skepticism, that Michaels also received $49,000 came from the German
Coal Mining Association and $40,000 from the western mining company
Cyprus Minerals.
In the Vermont case, the auto dealers eventually replaced Michaels with
John Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama in
Huntsville who believes that concerns about global warming might be
overstated.
However, Christy proved to be a far less agressive defender of that view
than Michaels. According to court transcripts, Christy eventually
admitted on the stand, "The increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
is real. It is due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels."
Vermont went on to win the case and eventually the Environmental
Protection Agency not only granted states the right
<http://www.grist.org/article/Obama-poised-to-grant-emissions-waiver->
to set those higher emissions standards but adopted the stricter rules
<http://www.grist.org/article/2009-05-18-obama-administration-takes/>
nationwide.
Michaels is still frequently called on as an expert source by mainstream
media outlets. Even as he's bashed the IPCC for its lack of
transparency, he refuses to come clean about the sources of his funding.
It turns out the climate skeptics' most credible expert isn't so
credible after all.
http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2010/02/pat-michaels-climate-skeptic
