In the great climate change debate, Patrick Michaels emerged as the skeptic with clout, a levelheaded doubter with the scientific credentials to substantiate his claims against global warming. Michaels made it known that although he acknowledges that global warming is occurring (very slowly, he says), he believes the issue to be over-hyped, claiming the effects will be negligible. While the media made him out to be the "credible" skeptic, a reporter at Mother Jones set out to investigate the man who remained one of the few holdouts among scientists. After an investigation following the bizarre withdrawal of Michaels from the automotive industry's court witness list, it was discovered that he might just have some ulterior motives to his very public denials: money. Treehugger reports:
...the court's affidavit revealed he received money from at least one large energy company--and then Greenpeace obtained a curriculum vitae via the Freedom of Information act, and it was revealed that he had earned literally hundreds of thousands of dollars from coal and oil companies. In just one gig, he made $100,000 from the Intermountain Rural Electric Association to fund climate denial campaigning around the time of the release of An Inconvenient Truth.
Head over to Treehugger to read the full story. Could this new information perhaps equalize the damage done by Climategate?Photo via Read the Hook
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