UVA's Shame Continues: Newsweek Highlights Professor's Global Warming Denial
By: TheGreenMiles
Published On: 8/7/2007 1:02:54 PM
Newsweek's cover story this week takes an in-depth look at the energy industry-funded global warming denial machine. University of Virginia professor Patrick Michaels is prominently featured:
Industry found a friend in Patrick Michaels, a climatologist at the University of Virginia who keeps a small farm where he raises prize-winning pumpkins and whose favorite weather, he once told a reporter, is "anything severe." Michaels had written several popular articles on climate change, including an op-ed in The Washington Post in 1989 warning of "apocalyptic environmentalism," which he called "the most popular new religion to come along since Marxism." The coal industry's Western Fuels Association paid Michaels to produce a newsletter called World Climate Report, which has regularly trashed mainstream climate science. (At a 1995 hearing in Minnesota on coal-fired power plants, Michaels admitted that he received more than $165,000 from industry; he now declines to comment on his industry funding, asking, "What is this, a hatchet job?")
You may remember Michaels from his most recent controversy, when UVA was falsely proclaiming Michaels to be the state's official climatologist. SourceWatch has detailed Michaels' funding from the energy industry, which runs at least into six figures. Media Matters has called Michaels an "energy industry lackey."
Comments
Damned Wahoos (DanG - 8/7/2007 1:08:26 PM)
Hey Now! (UVAHoo - 8/7/2007 4:54:54 PM)
Just cause Michaels is a doofus ain't no reason to be raggin' on my Hoos. Wahoowa baby!
Let's go Hokies! (DanG - 8/11/2007 12:04:13 AM)
"It's all just politics" (Teddy - 8/7/2007 1:53:04 PM)
is a comment I have had from more than one pro-Republican voter, by which they mean that, the Republicans having successfully politicized global warming (and other scientific questions) then global warming no longer counts, you can't believe any of it... therefore, stop bothering me with all this political junk and let me get on with my television shows and my six-pack.
Hey now ... (TheGreenMiles - 8/7/2007 1:58:32 PM)
Let's keep six-packs out of this, you can pry my organic beer out of my cold dead hands :)
Agh! Forgive me (Teddy - 8/7/2007 2:43:03 PM)
it was intended as a metaphor... ordinary life and concerns thereof, or something :-)
Peculiar connections (Rebecca - 8/7/2007 2:52:33 PM)
Its weird, but I've noticed that most men who think Global Warming is a hoax are also anti-choice and think women donate their shoes to Goodwill and go home and have babies. Not sure what the connection is. Perhaps the connection is that the big business party also supports right wing reactionary family values, which is to say let's turn back the clock to when the only people who mattered were white guys with money.
Besides, if Global Warming is real perhaps we will have to wean ourselves off oil and other commodities owned by a lot of old white guys.
Oil Reserves Under the Ice Caps (hereinva - 8/7/2007 4:04:26 PM)
Maybe that explains their "denial". If the polar icecaps melt- it will be easier to extract the oil. In today's Post there is a story of Russia's "pole plant" below the Artic Ice Caps.
"Russia's Deep-Sea Flag Planting"
[http://www.washingto...]
TORONTO, Aug. 6 -- A dramatic submarine dive to plant the Russian flag on the seabed at the North Pole last week has rattled Canadian politics and underscored the growing stakes as the ice cap melts in the oil-rich Arctic.
Let the land rush begin.
On this topic. (Lowell - 8/7/2007 4:47:14 PM)
See
here for a fascinating take (by Matt Stoller) on the Bush Administration, global warming, the Lieberman-Warner bill, and a "dysfunctional, degraded, compromised and corrupt movement acting in bad faith." I'm not quite sure what to make of this, but I'd be interested in GreenMiles' and others' opinions.
Why is this guy still employed by UVA? (Bubby - 8/7/2007 7:01:09 PM)
If he's doing funded research then there are rules and consequences for using his science to serve industry purposes. If he is doing this as "professional activity" then there are also rules, limits and consequences. Sounds like the little entrepreneur should be wheeled to the street and let to swim in the private sector. Virginia taxpayers should not be paying to drape a mantle of respectability over his ass.