Politically inconvenient state climatologist Patrick Michaels enjoyed lukewarm support, at best, from his colleagues in the University of Virginia’s Environmental Science Department. That’s what I glean, reading between the lines, from Bob Gibson’s follow-up story in the Daily Progress about his resignation as state climatologist and semi-retirement from UVa. His colleagues were hardly rushing to his defense.
James N. Galloway, a UVa colleague and acid rain researcher, said Michaels, an outspoken Global Warming skeptic, politicized the office: “It’s too bad it was so politicized, but I think we can get beyond that.”
It doesn’t appear that Michaels got much support from his departmental chair, Joseph C. Zieman, either. As the Cavalier Daily reports:
The governor’s office stated earlier this year in an open letter interview that Michaels did not speak for climate policy for the Commonwealth of Virginia. … As long as the pieces he has written have nothing legally wrong with them, however controversial, they are protected by academic freedom. University faculty are free to write about whatever they wish and can express diverse opinions.”
Zieman added that Michaels — who he described as “a member … of a small group of people that are called skeptics” — has not resigned as a research professor at the University.
The state climatological office, now re-named the university climatological office, has been turned over to research coordinator Philip J. “Jerry” Stenger.
Update: It appears that Michaels is still updating his “World Climate Report” blog.
Update: Our understanding of climate change grows daily — and not always to the benefit of the conventional wisdom. Check this out: “Carbon dioxide did not end the last Ice Age.
Deep-sea temperatures rose 1,300 years before atmospheric CO2, ruling out the greenhouse gas as driver of meltdown, says study in Science.”
I guess we can add Lowell Stott, professor of earth sciences at the University of Southern California, to the list of Global Warming deniers. “The climate dynamic is much more complex than simply saying that CO2 rises and the temperature warms,” Stott said. The complexities “have to be understood in order to appreciate how the climate system has changed in the past and how it will change in the future.”
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