SFL E-Leadership: Patrick Michaels on Global Warming

“Global Warming Realities and Fantasies”

For this installment of the E-Leadership Series, Students For Liberty will be teaming up with the Cato Institute to present Global Warming Realities and Fantasies by Patrick Michaels, Cato Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies. Each month the Cato Institute hosts a lecture for the DC Forum for Freedom, a coalition of local pro-liberty student groups. This month they feature a live webcast of the lecture and host a discussion board, so that students across the world can listen to and participate in a Q&A session with their scholar.

Date: Friday, January 22nd

Time: 4:00pm EST

Description: Congress is currently considering legislation that would allow the average American in 2050 the carbon dioxide emissions of the average citizen in 1867. Costs are undefined, but benefits are exceedingly small, even if all nations that have current obligations under the Kyoto Protocol did the same. At the same time, it is demonstrable that global warming is occurring at a much lower rate than had been anticipated by climate models. Several troubling examples of bias in climate science can easily be demonstrated. All of these argue that any stringent limitations of carbon dioxide are not warranted at this time and that they might actually delay the development of more efficient technologies, having the unintended consequence of creating more warming than would have occurred in their absence.

Speaker: Patrick J. Michaels

Patrick J. Michaels is a Distinguished Senior Fellow in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. He is a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. Michaels was also a research professor of Environmental Sciences at University of Virginia for thirty years. Michaels is a contributing author and reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. His writing has been published in the major scientific journals, including Climate Research, Climatic Change, Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Climate, Nature, and Science, as well as in popular serials such as the Washington Post, Washington Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Houston Chronicle, and Journal of Commerce. He was an author of the climate “paper of the year” awarded by the Association of American Geographers in 2004. He has appeared on most of the worldwide major media. Michaels holds A.B. and S.M. degrees in biological sciences and plant ecology from the University of Chicago, and he received a Ph.D. in ecological climatology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1979.