Pat Roberts: The Coal Industry's Best Friend

Melissa Meehan of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy has sent this email out. The Florida Republican Women's Network invited Cato Institute senior fellow Pat Michaels to speak. He has been doing his best to convince people that global warming is bogus. His research is funded by the coal induatry.

Meehan wants activists to voice their displeasure in The Buzz comments.

INFO:
Pat Michaels is coming to Florida on Aug. 25 to speak to the Florida Republican Women's Network in Orlando at the Renaissance Orlando Hotel.

Here is a link exposing Pat Michael's funding sources: http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/personfactsheet.php?id=4
Here is a link to more on Michael's background from SourceWatch: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Pat_Michaels
Attached is the Newsweek story on global warming deniers.

Here is a quote from Ross Gelbspan, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who wrote the book on the global warming disinformation campaign:

Pat Michaels, who has received hundreds of thousands in coal industry money
to misrepresent the truth about global warming, is a laughing stock in the scientific community. As one leading internationally known climate scientist concluded: Michaels' work "contains so many errors, misconceptions and misrepresentations" that it would not even be considered for serious scientific peer-review.

-- Ross Gelbspan, author, The Heat is On (1997), Boiling Point (2004)

Here is a blurb on Dr. Michaels from a recent issue of Newsweek: (full story attached)


Groups that opposed greenhouse curbs ramped up. They "settled on the
'science isn't there' argument because they didn't believe they'd be able
to convince the public to do nothing if climate change were real," says
David Goldston, who served as Republican chief of staff for the House of
Representatives science committee until 2006. Industry found a friend in
Patrick Michaels, a climatologist at the University of Virginia who keeps a
small farm where he raises prize-winning pumpkins and whose favorite
weather, he once told a reporter, is "anything severe." Michaels had
written several popular articles on climate change, including an op-ed in
The Washington Post in 1989 warning of "apocalyptic environmentalism,"
which he called "the most popular new religion to come along since
Marxism." The coal industry's Western Fuels Association paid Michaels to
produce a newsletter called World Climate Report, which has regularly
trashed mainstream climate science. (At a 1995 hearing in Minnesota on
coal-fired power plants, Michaels admitted that he received more than
$165,000 from industry; he now declines to comment on his industry

funding, asking, "What is this, a hatchet job?")