Patrick Michaels, Virginia’s state climatologist, is not alone in questioning global warming hysteria. He has allies among other state climatologists in departing from the putative “consensus” among climatologists regarding the severity and urgency of the global warming crisis. Now, according to the Washington Post, the “irregular system” of state-supported offices of climatologists is coming under criticism. Writes the Post:
A root of the conflict is that, although state climatologists and atmospheric scientists study “climate,” they can attack the same problems very differently. State climatologists often are trained to rely on past weather data — records that show how much the Earth has already warmed.
State climatologists’ critics in the scientific community study much broader periods and use computer models to determine how much warmer the Earth will become if pollution isn’t curtailed. The view of critics often is simple: State climatologists are behind the times.
Ah, that’s it. The state climatologists are rustic simpletons who can’t keep up with the times. Rubes that they are, they deal with real-world data rather than computer models that often fail to replicate that data when projected backwards in time. Although the Post article was generally fair toward Michaels, the authors left out what is perhaps his most controversial argument of all: how the political economy of global warming distorts the science of global warming.
Critics have sought to delegitimize Michaels’ scientific arguments by pointing to the fact that he has obtained some of his funding from the fossil fuel industry, presumably biasing his findings. But that argument cuts two ways.
As Michaels argues in his book, “Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians and the Media,” most climatologists in the United States get their research funding from the federal government. In an environment in which the mass media fan the flames of hysteria — systematically hyping evidence that supports the global warming paradigm and ignoring the evidence that doesn’t (a phenomenon that Michaels documents copiously) — and in which politicians respond to public opinion informed by that bias, the only scientists who will get federal funding are those who tout the party line. Professional advancement follows funding. To win big federal grants, win tenure and rise in the academic establishment, aspiring professors must support the tenets of the prevailing paradigm. To go against the tide of global warming is to court professional suicide.
State climatology departments are independent — their funding comes from states, not the federal government. State climatologists don’t court professional suicide by speaking truth to power. Little wonder that state climatologists have been among the more outspoken critics of global warming hysteria. How ironic: Those who point to a supposed scientific “consensus” in regard to global warming enforce that consensus by stigmatizing and driving out through political means those who do not conform to that consensus!
(For the record, I believe that global warming is a real phenomenon, but it is far from clear how much is due to human causes and how much the consequences are to be feared. There are many other environmental threats — deforestatation, erosion, loss of habitat, and pollution as traditionally understood — where we should be focusing our attention.)