Patrick Michaels, former state climatologist, has been excluded from Virginia’s dialogue on climate change on the grounds that the science is settled. But is it really?
Patrick Michaels has earned such a reputation as a Global Warming skeptic that many people who follow the climate change debate might be surprised at some of his opinions. Temperatures around the world are heating up, he says… Just very slowly, far more slowly than the climate computer models are projecting. The former Virginia state climatologist also agrees that human activity probably has nudged temperatures a little higher than they would have in the absence of humans.
But Michaels has a few things to say that would not make him welcome in, say, the Governor’s Commission on Climate Change, which takes the global warming debate as settled and regards the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the final authority on the subject. While he may be denied a forum at the climate change commission, Michaels did cut loose last week at the South Richmond Rotary Club, where I got to meet him.
Michaels builds much of his case around the inconvenient truth that global temperatures have leveled off, or even cooled slightly, over the past 11 years. (Just because the New York Times doesn’t deem the trend noteworthy enough to report doesn’t mean that it’s not a fact. It is.) None of the climate models upon which the IPCC forecasts are based predicted the temperature stasis – they all forecast continuously rising temperatures. Said Michaels: “Not one model can emulate the climate behavior since 1998.”
Most inconvenient indeed.
The stall in rising temperatures doesn’t mean that global warming isn’t real, Michaels says, but it does suggest that human influence on climate change is modest compared to natural variations in solar output and climate oscillations such as El Nino. The data certainly don’t conform to the alarming projections of those who call for radical overhauls in the economy on the grounds of impending apocalypse. Continue reading this column…
