Patrick Michaels

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Patrick J. Michaels (born c. 1942?) is a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, and the state climatologist for Virginia. His professional specialty was the influence of climate on agriculture. He is noted for his views as an opponent of global warming theory and frequently writes and speaks for popular audiences on the topic of climate change. He is a fellow of the Cato Institute and edits the World Climate Report, published by the Western Fuels Association through WFA's Greening Earth Society. His work has been published in Climate Research, Climatic Change and Geophysical Research Letters.

Michaels is one of a group of global warming skeptics and continues to dispute some aspects of global warming, including evidence of rising global temperatures. Recent statements suggest, however, that he is accepting the conclusion of the IPCC that there is a human influence on the climate, though he continues to maintain that current and future warming will occur at the low end of the range IPCC assessments:

scientists know quite precisely how much the planet will warm in the foreseeable future, a modest three-quarters of a degree (C) [in 50 years]

All this has to do with basic physics, which isn't real hard to understand. It has been known since 1872 that as we emit more and more carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, each increment results in less and less warming. In other words, the first changes produce the most warming, and subsequent ones produce a bit less, and so on. But we also assume carbon dioxide continues to go into the atmosphere at an ever-increasing rate. In other words, the increase from year-to-year isn't constant, but itself is increasing. The effect of increasing the rate of carbon dioxide emissions, coupled with the fact that more and more carbon dioxide produces less and less warming compels our climate projections for the future warming to be pretty much a straight line. Translation: Once human beings start to warm the climate, they do so at a constant rate. [1]

This "linear" view is not accepted by most climate scientists, nor is it supported by either modeling data or observation. Michaels is also known for his reliance on satellite temperature measurements that seemed to contradict other evidence of global warming. Recent corrections to those measurements now show global warming at rates almost identical to that seen in other measurements.

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