Utilities giving big bucks to global warming skeptic
By SETH BORENSTEIN | Associated Press
July 27, 2006

WASHINGTON (AP) – Coal-burning utilities are passing the hat for one of the few remaining scientists skeptical of the global warming harm caused by industries that burn fossil fuels.

Pat Michaels _ Virginia’s state climatologist, a University of Virginia professor and senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute _ told Western business leaders last year that he was running out of money for his analyses of other scientists’ global warming research. So last week, a Colorado utility organized a collection campaign to help him out, raising at least $150,000 in donations and pledges.

The Intermountain Rural Electric Association of Sedalia, Colo., gave Michaels $100,000 and started the fund-raising drive, said Stanley Lewandowski, IREA’s general manager. He said one company planned to give $50,000 and a third plans to give Michaels money next year.

“We cannot allow the discussion to be monopolized by the alarmists,” Lewandowski wrote in a July 17 letter to 50 other utilities. He also called on other electric cooperatives to launch a counterattack on “alarmist” scientists and specifically Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” …

Michaels is best known for his newspaper opinion columns and books, including “Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians and the Media.” However, he also writes research articles published in scientific journals.
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Progress Report Archives 2006 – American Progress Action Fund

WHO IS PAT MICHAELS?: Pat Michaels is a climate scientist based at the University of Virgina. John P. Holdren, a Harvard scientist, told the Senate Republican Policy Committee that Michaels has “published little if anything of distinction in the professional literature, being noted rather for his shrill op-ed pieces and indiscriminate denunciations of virtually every finding of mainstream climate science.” In 2003, Michaels famously “proved” that global warming was mostly hype by mixing up degrees and radians. In 2004, Michaels told Business Week, “We know how much the planet is going to warm. It is a small amount, and we can’t do anything about it.” This year, Michaels completely misrepresented a study by University of Missouri Professor Curt Davis to falsely claim that Antarctica has been gaining ice in recent years. Michaels’ views about climate change are at odds with the conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a rigorously peer-reviewed report that involved thousands of scientists from over 100 countries, which concluded, “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities” and that, absent aggressive mitigation efforts, future warming will be significant and dangerous.
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On the Roof of Peru, Omens in the Ice By Doug Struck, Washington Post Foreign Service

[Researchers] have confirmed a rapid recession of glaciers worldwide. Snows on Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro, extolled by Ernest Hemingway as “wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white,” will be gone within 14 years, Thompson estimates. Glaciers in the Alps, the Himalayas and throughout the Andes are also shrinking, he and other researchers have found.

The dramatic rise in carbon dioxide that has accompanied the industrial age has brought a spike in global temperatures. Scientists have found that the jump in temperatures is even greater in the upper atmosphere, where the glaciers reign on silent mountain peaks.

Glaciers store an estimated 70 percent of the world’s fresh water. Water that falls as snow moves through the slowly churning ice and may emerge from the glacier’s edge thousands of years later as meltwater. Humans have long depended on the gradual and faithful runoff.

The melting of glaciers in the Himalayas, which feed seven great Asian rivers, will bring “massive eco and environmental problems for people in western China, Nepal and northern India,” a World Wildlife Fund report concluded last year.

“The repercussions of this are very scary,” agreed Tim Barnett, a climate scientist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. “When the glaciers are gone, they are gone. What does a place like Lima do? Or, in northwest China, there are 300 million people relying on snowmelt for water supply. There’s no way to replace it until the next ice age.”