“An expensive (read $6 trillion) attempt to prevent an effective doubling of CO2 will almost certainly fail, delaying a few years at best,” he wrote in a 1990 op-ed in USA Today. “If we go down this road, therefore, we could be faced with (1) an impoverished world waiting for a warming that never happens or (2) a world too poor to adapt to a climate catastrophe.”
If dr. Trying to undermine others’ findings on climate change, Michaels returned favors to his critics and attacked his interpretations of data and his conclusions. In 2013, the forward-thinking news site Think Progress ran an article headlined “Patrick Michaels: Cato’s Climate Expert Has a History of Getting It Wrong,” cataloging all sorts of predictions and statements he’d made that didn’t hold up. In a 2001 article in The Washington Times, Dr. Michaels, for example, that hybrid cars were a doomed experiment.
Companies like Toyota, which had launched the Prius in 1997, “had found that gas in this country is so cheap (despite the 40 cents a gallon tax) that no one but die-hard technophiles and hyper-greens would to spend several thousand dollars extra for a hybrid,” Dr. Michaels wrote.
dr. Michaels wrote or co-authored a number of books, including “Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians and the Media” (2004) and, with Paul C. Knappenberger, “Lukewarming: The New Climate Science That Changes Everything” (2016) In the foreword to “Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know,” a 2009 book he co-authored with Robert C. Balling Jr. University, said the governor of Virginia, Tim Kaine, muzzled him, and that other state climatologists who questioned the dogma of climate change felt similar pressure.
“What’s so scary that some governors don’t want you to know?” He wrote. “Apparently it is this: the world is not going to end because of global warming. Furthermore, we don’t really have the resources to significantly change the planet’s temperature trajectory.”
The Marriage of Dr. Michaels with Erika Kancler ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Rachel Schwartz; two brothers, Robert and Tom; and two children from his first marriage, Erika and Robert Michaels.