Patrick J. Michaels

Pat Michaels is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia. According to Nature magazine, Michaels is one of the most popular lecturers in the nation on the subject of global warming. He 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.

In a field that has become dominated by sensationalist media coverage and flawed research, Pat Michaels has earned his exceptional reputation by honing a skeptical, rigorous, and eminently accessible approach to the science and public policy of global warming. Highlighted by Nature  magazine as one of the most popular lecturers in the country on the subject, Michaels offers a novel synthesis of science and important policy implications.

Michaels’s core argument is that, unless the independent work of dozens of scientists is terribly wrong, we know the amount of future warming with a surprisingly small range of error, and that the warming will be modest and easily adapted to by vibrant economies. Further, he notes that it is virtually impossible to significantly affect the established trajectory of global warming without the investment capital provided by those economies.

Michaels is a student of science as well as a practitioner. Because it is a publicly funded enterprise, it is subject to many of the same distortions and political spin that affect education, welfare, and Social Security. He elucidates this perspective in the critically acclaimed book Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media. Each of his presentations reflects the stunningly candid, bright, and provocative perspective he has brought to his decades of work, writing, speaking, and research. Topping it all off is the razor-sharp wit that suffuses every speech he delivers. No one leaves one of Michaels’s presentations disappointed.

Michaels has won several awards and honors, despite the fact that his synthesis is against the grain of publicly contorted science. He was an author of the climate “paper of the year” awarded by the Association of American Geographers in 2004, won the American Library Associations 1994 international competition for “best government publications” worldwide, and is past-president of the American Association of State Climatologists, the only climate-specific professional organization in the world.

Global Warming: Predictably Exaggerated

Why is news about global warming always bad? Why do scientists so often offer dire predictions about the future of the environment? Climatologist Patrick J. Michaels says it’s only natural. He argues that the way we do science today--when issues compete with each other for monopoly funding by the federal government--creates a culture of exaggeration and a political community that then takes credit for having saved us from certain doom.

Michaels starts with a succinct discussion of climate-change science and then unrolls a litany of falsehood, exaggeration, and misstatement. He cites the errors and exaggerations in scientific papers, news reports, and television sound bites--from the “National Assessment” of global warming, a Clinton-era document that used computer models that its authors knew did not work, to the infamous New York Times story about the melting of the North Pole, published in September 2000 and halfheartedly retracted three weeks later. In an eminently understandable and often humorous presentation, Michaels explains why these exaggerations persist and what to do about them.

In addition to presentations on global warming, Michaels also speaks on a wide range of related environmental and climate-related topics, including the environmental and climate, the environment and health, environmental law and regulation, the Clean Air Act, and pollution.

Michaels is a contributing author and reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He was an author of the 2003 climate science "Paper of the Year" awarded by the Association of American Geographers, for the demonstration that urban heat-related mortality declined significantly as cities became warmer. His writing has been published in the major scientific journals, including Climate Research, Climatic Change, Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Climate, Nature, and Science; and his articles have appeared also in the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Houston Chronicle, and the Journal of Commerce. He has appeared on ABC, NPR's All Things Considered, PBS, Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, BBC and Voice of America. He holds A.B. and S.M. degrees in biological sciences and plant ecology from the University of Chicago, and he received his Ph.D. in ecological climatology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1979.