Most Credible Climate Skeptic - Not So Credible

http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2010/02/pat-michaels-climate-skeptic

Patrick Michaels has more credibility than your average climate skeptic. Unlike some of the kookier characters that populate the small world of climate denialists—like Lord Christopher Monckton, a sometime adviser to Margaret Thatcher who claims that "We are a carbon-starved planet," or H. Leighton Steward, a retired oil executive and author of a best-selling diet book who argues that carbon dioxide is "green"—Michaels is actually a bona fide climate scientist. As such, he's often quoted by reporters as a reasonable expert who argues that global warming has been overhyped. But what Michaels doesn't mention in his frequent media appearances is his history of receiving money from big polluters.

Michaels, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, has some impressive-sounding credentials. He has a PhD in ecological climatology and is a senior fellow in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. He's a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and a former program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. He regularly touts his work as a contributing author and reviewer of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. (Almost every climate scientist in the world has at some point contributed to or reviewed an IPCC study.) Unlike climate skeptics who implausibly claim that there's no such thing as global warming, Michaels accepts that it's happening, but downplays the severity of the problem and the role that human activity plays in the phenomenon.

snip

The auto lawyers were "desperate to shield who Pat Michaels makes his money from," David Bookbinder, chief climate counsel for the Sierra Club and one of the lawyers for the state in the case. "It's beyond unrealistic," said Bookbinder. "It's like saying in a speeding case that you're not able to ask about how fast someone was going."

If only GreenPeace had enough money to buy all the "experts" they wanted.

That was all I needed to read for his credibility to be undermined with me.

They would say anything for a buck too.

One, essentially the narrative (if you can call it that) floated by the "drill, baby, drill!" ostriches and Sarah Palin Creationio-theocrats, is that humanity can put as much shit as we want to into the atmosphere, because The 6,000 year old Earth is Flat, the rapture is coming, and the atmosphere doesn't really exist- only Jesus does.

The other narrative, which is true in a sense, is that we don't exactly know what the specific impact pumping up the atmospheric CO2 levels will be, beyond an inevitable temperature increase of some magnitude. Some species may do better. Some will certainly do worse. Weather in some places may improve. Weather in many places will get worse. We can't predict exactly what will happen, but it's pretty clear something will.

So the question is, do we continue to twiddle the knobs of our planet's climate whole hog, or do we do whatever we can to mitigate the impact? Seems to me like the answer is obvious, but then I'm not on a petroleum company's payroll.