Tasteless but I couldn't resist. See-also Joseph D'Aleo suffers soft delete or Science advances one funeral at a time. Or perhaps it would be better to see Cainozoic history of southern New Zealand: An accord between geological observations and plate-tectonic predictions. Although if I look at CO2 "Science"'s obit, He leaves a legacy of sound science and dedication to the scientific process is rather pedestrian1. I'm expecting better from WUWT... nope; just a cut-n-paste of the CO2 "Science". Or vice-versa, who knows. By contrast, Kate Carter got "great scholar". Let's hope some of the Watties read this and feel the need to puff PM a bit. I'd like to accuse them of being small for taking a dig at Mann in PM's obit, but that would be rather inappropriate in a post like this.And now I realise I forgot to do my due diligience: did PM make it into Stoat? And the answer is he's doing better at that; in Death at UAH I gave him "the real septics like Singer and Michaels and Inhofe". In Trump's EPA pick will make Obama regret his environmental overreach? he got "evil arch uber-villain Patrick Michaels" though I was riffing off this, he didn't really earn it all himself. And a few more, like MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen urges Trump: “Cut the funding of climate science by 80% to 90% until the field cleans up’? but there he's a filler that just about makes the cut before I trail off: "Otherwise its Happer, Idso, Michaels… and then tails off into blanks". And "old" Stoat noted PM was a touch shy on the betting front.
Notes
1. As well as untrue, obvs.
Refs
* Empathy and denialism by Brian
* The United States: World Party Central
* Gavin on Twotter: "why Patrick Michaels was scorned by mainstream climate science - it wasn’t because of his policy preferences, but because of his mendacity"
* Weather and Climate Disaster Losses So Far in 2022, Still Not Getting Worse - Pielke
* Now, Read This Properly, Again: Tim Worstall looks at The oil and gas industry has delivered $2.8bn (£2.3bn) a day in pure profit for the last 50 years, a new analysis has revealed.
* Josh Hawley's UnAmerican Nationalism
* ATTP: Limits to Growth? and my reply. It bounced off, of course.
I wondered a couple of days ago how snide you'd be about PM's death. I guessed about right - possibly even to your credit, I'd say some, but not excessively.
ReplyDeleteI'd put him down as a well-informed advocate for a particular point of view. A sort of mirror image of McKibben or Monbiot. And of course, just like with them, you can find plenty of examples of egregious manipulation of information. And if that point of view is reasonably far from ones own, the manipulation will appear simply as downright deliberate lying.
I read a couple of his books and liked them - quite a long way from the alarmists caricature of fossil-fuel funded denier.
If anybody wants gratuitous misinformation, we can go directly to WP, and I quote the last paragraph of the lede to PM's bio -
"Michaels' viewpoint, as argued in a 2002 article in the journal Climate Research, is that the planet will see "a warming range of 1.3–3.0°C, with a central value of 1.9°C" for the 1990 to 2100 period (a value far smaller than the IPCC's average predictions)
More like Mr Mainstream. (or in 2002 he judged the future evolution of temps better than the IPCC)
P.S. The 'hard delete' was actually pretty funny..
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid you'll find the wiki article no longer says that :-).
ReplyDeleteI haven't read his books. Indeed I now struggle to recall anything of his that I've read. Is there anything of his publically available that I should try to read?
Now he really does (did?) seem part of the mainstream..
ReplyDeleteI don't think you'd enjoy much of his writing - probably a fair amount is still at the Cato website - though if you read 'Climate of Extremes' you might mistake it for RPJ in one of his bolshy 'mafia' moods. Anti-alarmism more than anti-GW.
I think I'm with Hansen on this: Pat was a cherry-picker, searching for bits of data in which the facts, for a limited period, seemed to contradict the community’s view on human-caused climate change,” he said. “Overall, he was selling bullshit, and perhaps he knew that, but he thought that climate scientists were exaggerating, so he continued even as facts piled up against him. If only he had been right”.
ReplyDeleteMore like Mr Mainstream. (or in 2002 he judged the future evolution of temps better than the IPCC)
ReplyDeleteLet's check the article. It consists of a few methods by which they adjust IPCC TAR projections to find lower estimates. It's been 20 years so let's check progress so far...
Adjustment 1 - they apply a lower climate sensitivity and adjusted climate-carbon-cycle feedback to TAR scenarios.
Michaels' average warming from 1990 to 2021: 0.35C
TAR average warming from 1990 to 2021: 0.6C
Observed warming from 1990 to 2021: ~ 0.6C /- a bit
Adjustment 2 - they assume CO2 concentrations will rise from 2000 to 2100 at a constant rate of 1.54ppm/year
Michael's predicted 2021 CO2 concentration: 402.5ppm
TAR average 2021 CO2 concentration: ~ 415ppm
Observed 2021 CO2 concentration: 415ppm
They apply their lower CO2 forecast to TAR model sensitivities and get 0.55C warming from 1990-2021. Not far away, basically just because the difference between 403 and 415 is doesn't result in a big difference in forced response at that point. However, applying their own sensitivity estimate results in a reduction to 0.3C warming, even further away from observations.