Patrick Michaels - Views On Climate Change

Views On Climate Change

Michaels has said that he does not contest the basic scientific principles behind greenhouse warming and acknowledges that the global mean temperature has increased in recent decades. He is one of the most widely quoted global warming skeptics and has described himself as a skeptic. He contends that the changes will be minor, not catastrophic, and may even be beneficial.

He has written extensive editorials on this topic for the mass media, and for think tanks and their publications such as Regulation.

cientists know quite precisely how much the planet will warm in the foreseeable future, a modest three-quarters of a degree (C)

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.

Michaels asks:

Why is the news on global warming always bad? Perhaps because there's little incentive to look at things the other way. If you do, you're liable to be pilloried by your colleagues. If global warming isn't such a threat, who needs all that funding?