Climate of Extremes: Patrick J. Michaels

Patrick J. Michaels: Cato Institute

This article appeared in National Review Online’s Planet Gore page (Jan 30, 2009)

Al Gore’s Climate of Extremes [Patrick J. Michaels]

Ho-hum. On January 28, in the midst of a pelting sleet storm, Al Gore told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the end is nigh from global warming.

He told the Senate that “some scientists” predict up to 11 degrees of warming in the next 91 years (while failing to note that the last 12 have seen exactly none), and that this would “bring a screeching halt to human civilization and threaten the fiber of life everywhere on earth.” Hey folks, this is serious!

Besides having a remarkable knack for scheduling big speeches on remarkably cold or snowy days (it’s known as the “Gore Effect” in journalistic circles), Gore has been incredibly ineffective in bringing his message home.

According to the New York Times, Gore told the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last November, “I feel, in a sense, I’ve failed badly. . . . [T]here is not anything anywhere close to an appropriate sense of urgency [about global warming]. This is an existential threat.”

And fail he has. The Pew Foundation recently asked Americans to choose which of 20 prominent issues is of most importance. They included the economy, crime, education, and, of course, global warming, which came in dead last….(read the rest here)

The video above is part 1 of 3 (be sure to watch all three parts) in which scientist Patrick J. Michaels is interviewed by Jon Caldara, president of The Independence Institute, a Colorado think tank. Patrick J. Michaels and Robert C. Balling, Jr. are the authors of Climate of Extremes, published by The Cato Institute in Jan 2009. Patrick J. Michaels is Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies at The Cato Institute in Washington D.C. Michaels is a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and visiting scientist with the Marshall Institute in Washington, D.C. 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. Michaels is a contributing author and reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change….

In the Preface to Climate of Extremes former Virginia State Climatologist Michaels describes how he and other state climatologists were stripped of their titles, and jobs, and told by their governors to “shut up” about the global warming hoax. Something about, in the case of Oregon’s Climatologist, contradictions interfering “with the state’s stated goals to reduce greenhouse gases.’’

Continuing from the Preface:

David Legates, at the University of Delaware, was told by Governor Ruth Ann Minner (D) that he could no longer speakon globalwarming as State Climatologist. His faculty position is a regular tenured line in the geography department. He’s free, as State Climatologist, to say anything about the weather, so long as there’s no political implication…..

Out West, things got even uglier. The Assistant State Climatologist for Washington, Mark Albright, was fired because, despite his boss’s orders, he refused to stop e-mailing—to journalists, to inquiringcitizens, to anyone—the entire snowfall record for the Cascade Mountainsrather than the cherry-picked one. For e-mailing that record,the assistant state climatologist in Washington lost his job.What had started with Oregon’s George Taylor had migratedacross the Columbia River.

For a further account of these shenanigans see NBC & Global Warming Jihad

Patrick J. Michaels and Jon Caldara

For some comic relief listen to Paul Shanklin as Algore singing “Ball of Fire” (courtesy Rush Limbaugh show:

Tags: al gore, algore, Climate Change, climate of extremes, co2emission, dire predictions, global cooling, global warming, global warming deniers, Global Warming Hoax, patrickj michaels, robert c balling jr, save the humans, save the planet, the deniers, the goracle