Those expecting Oberlin College Republicans-sponsored climatologist Patrick J. Michaels to deny global warming were surprised when he opened his talk on Oct. 5 by acknowledging the fact: “Global warming is a very real thing and it is caused by people,” he said.

Before Michaels took the podium, not an empty seat was to be seen in West Lecture Hall and the audience spilled out into the aisles. The waiting crowd perused literature that echoed statements from noted climate journalist Elizabeth Kolbert’s speech on the realities of global warming given the night before. One could feel the incredulity radiating from the crowd of mostly students and professors.

After establishing global warming’s reality, Michaels complained that although he had been interviewed for Kolbert’s book Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change, Kolbert had not published anything substantial from the three-hour interview. Additionally, he charged Al Gore with leaving important facts out of his slide show warning against global warming. These omissions led Michaels to title his lecture “Inconvenient Facts Ignored by Elizabeth Kolbert and Al Gore.”

Throughout the lecture, Michaels referenced both Kolbert and Gore, specifically Kolbert’s data points on temperature change. He accused Kolbert of selecting data with too few points, saying, “When you look at the longer data sets, you see 2002 is the high point for ice history…All our climate models say that in the course of the 21st century, Antarctica gained ice.”

Addressing Gore’s movie and book, Michaels showed a visual temperature history of the south pole and claimed that Gore focused, misleadingly,  on just two percent of Antarctica. He claimed that “the net temperature gain…is negative.” Michaels then called Gore’s statistics on Greenland “an example of how he misleads with modern color graphic and powerpoints.”

Michaels, who has a brief submitted to the Supreme Court recommending against economic restrictions to reduce global warming, showed a graph labeled with years on the x-axis and hurricanes in the title where the numbers on the chart increased with each year. The expectation was that the numbers symbolized the number of hurricanes per year. However, they actually represented the number of news stories about hurricanes. Michaels acknowledged that the number of severe hurricanes has increased, but he added, “correlation does not equal causation.”

Citing a recently published paper and backing it up with projected graphics, he said, “between 2003 and 2005, the world’s oceans lost twenty percent of the heat that they had gained from human-caused global warming in the last fifty years.” However, Michaels said, no one knows what caused this cooling.

At the outset of his lecture, Michaels posited, “In science we only have two things…and two things only. We have data, which is the past, and we have models, or prospective data for the future. And the name of the game in science is to get the model for the future to be reliable based upon what has happened in the past.”

He said that current models over-predict global warming. The real change in global warming, he said, is seven hundredths of a degree.

Things got contentious when Michaels opened the floor to questions. Audience members challenged Michaels on the sources of his funding — according to a 1995 Harpers Magazine article, numerous coal and energy sources have sponsored him. They also questioned his theory that “you only publish positive results,” and accused him of what one student characterized as “gambling with our future.”

With the confidence of a practiced economist, Michaels said that energy efficiency would come about as a natural result of a competitive market. “The future belongs to the efficient,” he said.