‘Lukewarmer’ was leading contrarian in debate on climate change
Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who became a lightning rod in debates around climate change, reviled by activists and revered among skeptics for using his academic pedigree to challenge the broad scientific consensus on the causes and consequences of global warming, died July 15 at his home in Washington. He was 72.
His family confirmed his death but did not cite a cause.
Michaels, who spent decades as a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and as Virginia’s state climatologist, was one of the most prominent contrarian voices in political and policy discussions surrounding climate change.
Michaels wished to be known not as a climate change “skeptic,” but rather as a “lukewarmer.” That term, said Judith Curry, an atmospheric scientist and professor emerita at Georgia Tech, denotes someone who argues that global warming is caused only partly by human activity, with natural climate variability as another contributing factor.
He did not dispute the rising temperatures widely documented around the planet, nor did he deny a human role in the phenomenon. “I believe in climate change caused by human beings,” he told The Washington Post in 2006. “What I’m skeptical about is the glib notion that it means the end of the world as we know it.”
His stance, and the forceful way he promoted it in his frequent media appearances, attracted the condemnation of scientists and environmentalists who accused Michaels of obstructing policy changes that might mitigate the threat posed by climate change. They noted his association with the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, where he was for a period director of the Center for the Study of Science, as well as his financial backing by the fossil fuel industry, to question the integrity of the research he cited in support of his positions.
Michaels received a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences in 1971 and a master’s degree in biology in 1975, both from the University of Chicago. He received a doctorate in ecological climatology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1979. He was a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists.
With his combination of academic bona fides, his state title and his flair in the boxing ring of policy debate – he described former vice president Al Gore, a leading climate change activist, as a “scientist wannabe” and denounced the “self-selected community of climate boffins” and “keepers of the environmental-gloom paradigm” – Michaels proved an often effective champion of his cause.
“He was just a born fighter,” said Robert Balling, a professor at Arizona State University who cowrote books with Michaels including “The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air About Global Warming” (2000) and “Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know” (2009).
“I knew people who refused to debate him,” Balling added, recalling the frustrations of some scientists, highly trained in their fields but unpracticed in the political arena, who were called upon to spar with him.
He argued that the United States should not sign the 1997 Kyoto Protocol
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (the United States ultimately was not a signatory to the agreement) and described the 2016 Paris agreement (which the United States joined under President Barack Obama, left under President Donald Trump and rejoined under President Joe Biden) as “climatically insignificant.”
In 2006, the office of Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, a Democrat, asked Michaels to clarify that he did not speak for the state or the governor when he addressed matters related to global warming. Michaels stepped down from the post and from U-Va. the following year, lamenting what he said was a lack of “academic freedom.”
Michaels left the Cato Institute in 2019 and joined the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington. Responding to critics who noted his funding over the years from coal-burning utilities, he said that he had been “working on climate change long before I worked as a consultant” and that his “views have been quite consistent over that period.”