Scientist decries moral audacity of environmentalists linking tsunami and global warming

In response to the environmental experts busily creating links between the recent tsunami and global warming, Dr. Pat Michaels (VA state climatologist, author, UVA and Cato scholar) made the following announcement:

"Anyone who has the moral audacity to blame thousands of deaths caused by the Indian Ocean tsunamis on global warming is in grave contravention of well- known facts about changes in sea level in that region. Unfortunately, it is another 'Predictable Distortion' of global warming, similar to dozens documented in my recent book.

Topex-Poseidon satellite data published in 2001 in Science Magazine by Cabanes et al. show that the region where the tsunamis were most devastating has, in general, experienced a recent decline in sea level. When extended back 50 years, by matching satellite data with submarine measurements, the region shows a rise averaging about 0.35 inches per decade, for a fifty-year total of 1.75 inches. This is typical of global rates of sea-level change that have been constant for centuries, even millennia, as the planetary surface has warmed, cooled, and warmed.

The highest estimate for the recent tsunami currently stands at 35 feet, or 24,000% higher than the secular rise in sea level in the region in the last half-century. Additionally, the long-term record of sea level changes for Bombay was published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1995. It shows a net decline in sea level in the last 50 years.

In his new book, State of Fear, Michael Crichton repeatedly demonstrates that global warming ambulance-chasers often assume things to be true that simply are not. The book centers around a lawsuit by pacific islanders because of sea level rise; their case falls apart when the facts disclose that sea levels were actually falling in the region in question. Life imitates fiction. Michael Crichton should sue environmentalists who blame the massive death toll from the Indian Ocean's tragic tsunamis on sea level rise for plagiarism."

References:

Cabanes, C., et al. Sea level rise during the past 40 years determined from satellite and in situ observations. Science, Vol 294, 840-42 (2001).

United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 1995: Climate Change 1995. Cambridge Press. Data on page 367.

Dr. Michaels is a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and visiting scientist with the Marshall Institute in Washington, D.C. 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. He 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. Michaels is a contributing author and reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 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 has appeared on ABC, NPR's "All Things Considered," PBS, Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, BBC and Voice of America. According to Nature magazine, Pat Michaels may be the most popular lecturer in the nation on the subject of global warming.

To schedule an interview with Dr. Michaels, please contact Audrey Mullen at 202-861-5677 or 202-270-2772.