Patrick Michaels is a climate change denialist. He himself has estimated that about 40% of his funding comes from the oil companies. He has been criticised for manipulating the data of other scientists - not trivial mistakes or oversights, but deliberate serious manipulations. (Here's just one example where a colleague almost accuses him of fraud (http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2005/Crichton_20050927.pdf)
> One of the skeptics, Pat Michaels, has taken the graph from our 1988 paper with simulated global temperatures for scenarios A, B and C, erased the results for scenarios B and C, and shown only the curve for scenario A in public presentations, pretending that it was my prediction for climate change. Is this treading close to scientific fraud?
He's part of the Cato Institute, who have publically said they disagree with the scientific consensus on climate change.
Disappointing to see this worthless tripe on HN, and to see it getting any votes.
It would be nice if Hacker News could avoid the worst abuses of language that happens in public debate.
1) Climate has always and will always be 'changing'. It is a dynamic, not static, system.
2) No one denies that climate changes so 'climate change denialists' is the empty set.
3) To dispute the theory of 'catastrophic anthropogenic global warming' is not the same as denying 'warming', 'global warming' or even 'anthropogenic global warming'. It is only when you add in the 'catastrophic' part (which comes from the magnitude of the predicted positive feedbacks in global climate models) that you enter into the realm of serious disputes.
4) There is considerable evidence that there has been no statistically significant global warming for the last 20 years (anthropogenic or not) and even more evidence that the magnitude of the positive feedback included in the 'catastrophic anthropogenic global warming' models is much smaller than previously assumed.
5) If the climate models only match actual temperatures by lowering the postive feedbacks in the models then they are probably no longer predicting catastrophic warming.
Also 6) If client change is assumed to be occurring, catastrophic, and anthropogenic, what can and should we even do about it? Are the cures worse than the disease?
It's disappointing to see someone avoid addressing every single one of the issues raised in the original article, and instead focusing on attacking the author.
Would you care to address any of the points he made in the original article?
But what he wrote was: "Disappointing to see this worthless tripe on HN, and to see it getting any votes."
That is an ad-hominem attack, and disappointing to see on HN.
I want people to not waste their time bothering to check that guy's claims.
Scientists gather data and form an opinion.
This guy has an opinion before he sees any data; he's paid at least 40% of his funding for having that opinion; and then manipulates data to fit that opinion. He misrepresents other people's work and other people's opinions.
If he had lied once or twice then perhaps there's some useful information to be had by carefully checking what he's saying. But the pattern is so strong that people can safely ignore him. Just as we ignore the time-cube guy, or people who use phrases like quantum touch healing.
That is pretty much the definition of an ad-hominem attack.
Your criticisms of his approach are valid, but also apply to a good number of climatologists whose income is more dependent upon pro-AGW funding this his is dependent upon oil company funding. Glass houses, stones, etc.
FWIW, my position is that correlation between human activity and climate change has (finally) been solidly established, but:
- our models lack any real predictive ability w.r.t. future climate, except to say "interesting stuff will happen."
- catastrophic climate change happens regardless of human input
Given the above two points I'm unconvinced that there's any AGW-based argument for legislation. Argument based on atmospheric pollution harming human life? Sure.
Instead, we should be focusing on growing our technological and academic capacity towards climate engineering. Regardless of what AGW brings, at some point in our history, we will need to tweak the climate to survive.
No. He is paid to produce FUD. He is repeating a well known pattern of disruption that was pioneered by tobacco companies.
He has a track record for lying, for manipulating other people's research, for misrepresenting other people's views.
I'm not going to waste any time with people who are so intellectually dishonest and who are being paid to waste my time; people who are paid to spread misinformation and confusion.
Am I missing something?
The Tesla Roadster was ridiculous, but the cash it generated and the lessons it taught them gave them the opportunity to scale with the S sedan. Now the S sedan will give them that same cash/lessons combination to expand with whatever comes next.
This is no different than scaling a software startup, if you think about it.
That's a pretty big leap on the Authors part, one that isn't really justified from facts or information. We know basically nothing about Tesla's plans for their cheaper models or what they have/will do to reduce the cost.
It's really bizarre to me how much certain groups are just itching for Tesla to fail.