Former state official known as climate change contrarian
Patrick J. Michaels, a climate scientist who spoke out often and brashly against the prevailing view that climate change needs urgent attention, becoming a favorite of climate change doubters and a target of criticism by those advocating action on greenhouse gases and in other areas, died July 15 at his home in Washington. He was 72.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute, where he had been a senior fellow since 2019, announced his death. No cause was given.
Michaels was a visible and polarizing figure in the climate change debate — partly because of his stridency and partly because, unlike many politicians and other policymakers, he had scientific credentials. He held a doctorate in ecological climatology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, was for decades a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and Virginia’s state climatologist, and had published in scientific journals.
He spoke out forcefully against what he saw as environmental alarmism, in books and opinion articles and in appearances on television news shows and before governmental committees.
His critics said his ties to the libertarian Cato Institute, where he was director of the Center for the Study of Science for years before moving to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, made his pronouncements suspect, as did his backing from fossilfuel interests, including his acceptance of $100,000 from a Colorado utility, the Intermountain Rural Electric Association.
“This is a classic case of industry buying science to back up its anti-environmental agenda,” Frank O’Donnell, president of the Washington advocacy group Clean Air Watch, said in 2006 when the Colorado connection was reported.
Michaels contended that whatever warming there might be was incremental enough that humanity would adapt. The alarmism brought to the issue, he said, was actually causing people to care less, not more.
“You can only tell people that the world is going to end so many times,” he said during a 2017 interview on Carolina Journal Radio, “and when they notice the sun keeps rising, they tend to discount these predictions.”
Michaels became Virginia’s climatologist in 1980, a position that carried with it teaching duties at the University of Virginia and brought him a lot of questions that had nothing to do with climate change.
As he told The Daily Progress of Charlottesville in 1991, an insurance company might call wanting to know if the ground was really frozen on the date that a customer claimed she slipped on ice, or whether it was really raining on the date of a particular car accident.
Michaels began speaking out on environmental matters more than 40 years ago. He was concerned, he said, that alarmism would lead to hastily formulated policies and programs that would do more harm than good.
“Our policy should be commensurate with the state of our scientific knowledge,” he told the House energy and power subcommittee in 1989.
He didn’t deny that the planet might be warming. But he questioned whether human interventions would make much difference, and he challenged models that projected imminent global calamity.
“An expensive (read $6 trillion) attempt to prevent an effective doubling of CO2 will almost certainly fail, and at best will slow it down a few years,” he wrote in a 1990 opinion article in USA Today. “If we go down this road, we therefore may face (1) an impoverished world waiting for a warming that never occurs or (2) a world too poor to adapt to a climate disaster.”
Michaels wrote or co-wrote a number of books. In the preface to “Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know” (2009), a book he wrote with Robert C. Balling Jr., he explained his decision to leave the climatologist job and U.Va. He said then-Gov. Tim Kaine was muzzling him, and that other state climatologists who were questioning climate change dogma were feeling similar pressures.
“What is so scary that some governors don’t want you to know it?” he wrote. “Apparently it is this: The world is not coming to an end because of global warming. Further, we don’t really have the means to significantly alter the temperature trajectory of the planet.”