Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 7, 1993 TAG: 9302070062
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE LENGTH: Long
HE'S COOL AS FUTURE'S CLOUDY
PAT MICHAELS is to weather what Larry Sabato is to politics; the University of Virginia's most-quoted analyst. He's also a sought-after speaker on global warming. But now UVa wants to stop funding his office and Michaels may be left out in the cold.
This is why Pat Michaels is a talk-show host's dream guest. Ask him what he does as state climatologist, and he doesn't simply give a sound bite. He turns to his sidekick, Jerry Stenger, a wicked gleam in his eye, and launches into an impromptu comedy routine:
Michaels: The most common phone call goes like this: Stenger, you want me to be the state climatologist, or you want to take the call?
Stenger: You call me.
Michaels: OK. (Cupping hand to ear, as if he's talking on the phone.)
Stenger: State climatologist's office, Stenger speaking.
Michaels: Uh, you keep weather data?
Stenger: Yes, indeed, we keep all kinds of data.
Michaels: Well, I'm with the XYZ Meat Co. and we had a truckload full of wieners that . . . exploded!
Stenger: Sounds like you've got a problem.
Michaels: You got any data on how hot it was?
Stenger: Tell me what day you're talking about.
Michaels: Uh, sometime in July.
Stenger: Let me look that up . . . Well, it was a very unusually hot day on the 20th.
Michaels: Yeah! That's when they exploded.
Stenger: That was a Sunday. Were you driving on Sunday?
Michaels: Yeah. `We aim to please.' our motto.
By this point, Michaels and his lunch companions have nearly dissolved into laughter, and nearby diners are starting to wonder what maniac has disrupted their lunchtime ambience. But Michaels, if he notices at all, relishes the attention.
"Now if you think we're making it up, this actually happened," he declares. "I can't tell you what company, because that would compromise the confidentiality, but last summer we had exploding wieners. We're not making this stuff up.
"You want to know what really happened? Our conclusion was it was hot, but not unusually so, therefore the explosion was not an act of God, it was an act of air conditioning not working. Now before you laugh, would you like to tell me what the value of a semi-truck full of weenies is?"
He doesn't either, but he knows it's a lot of money, the sort of thing that can be the subject of massive litigation and insurance claims. Time may be money, but weather can be, too, and each year the state climatologist's office - buried in the musty recesses of the University of Virginia environmental sciences department - fields 3,600 calls from folks whose livelihoods depend on the weather.
Environmental engineers who need 40 years worth of rainfall data before they can recommend where to put a landfill. Construction companies trying to prove why bad weather kept them from meeting their schedule. Lawyers trying to fix the blame in car wrecks. Film companies that want to know whether they can fake a New York winter scene in an Old Dominion autumn. Investors who need to know how much snow is likely to fall on a certain mountainside where they want to build a ski slope. Landowners who want to know whether their hillsides are suitable for growing grapes.
Even meat companies trying to figure out why their wieners exploded on the interstate between Norfolk and Richmond. Or anybody who needs to know something about the weather information that the National Weather Service collects but then turns over to each state's climatology office to actually do something with.
Some companies say they couldn't get by without someone to sort through those weather records for them. "I use them religiously," says Richard Chance, a Richmond-based arson investigator for the insurance industry. "It's very important that I know the specific temperature, on a specific day, at a specific time. The case I'm involved in right now deals in megabucks."
Which is precisely why the University of Virginia, which has funded the climatology office since the 1970s, now wants to pull the financial plug at the end of June - a move that would put Michaels, Stenger and researcher Chip Knappenberger out of jobs.
After all, the university reasons, the climatologist's office is really performing an economic development function for the state, so the state ought to pick up the $112,000 annual tab.
That argument may make sense to university administrators looking for ways to slash the school's budget in tight times. State legislators, who'll have to vote sometime in the next few weeks on whether to keep the climatologist's office going, have barely noticed that there is such a thing, much less a decision to be made about it.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Hunter Andrews, D-Hampton, one of the legislature's most important voices on money matters, simply shrugs. "I have no idea what's going to happen to it."
But the threat that the office might close has stirred up a squall among the businesses that depend on the place. "A tragedy," Chance says. "A big loss for us," says Catherine Councill at the Virginia Film Office.
And it's unleashed a hailstorm among some of Michaels' climatology colleagues around the country.
Michaels also is one of the nation's leading experts on global warming. The catch is he discounts the phenomenon, saying, in effect, no sweat. In fact, he's done studies that suggest that air pollution actually helps to cool the planet.
That's made him the poster boy of the coal industry, and industry in general, which loves to hear a scientist tell them their sulphur dioxide emissions aren't turning the Earth into an oven. Nature magazine ranks Michaels as the nation's most sought-after speaker on global warming, thanks in part to his appearances before such groups as the Association of American Railroads, the Economic Club of Detroit and the National Association of Manufacturers.
Michaels is an environmentalist's worst nightmare. He's not only a scientist with an opposing point of view, he's also glib enough to get his point across in the news media. "The Today Show." "This Week with David Brinkley." "Nightline." He's been on them all. He's testified before Congress. He writes periodic op-ed pieces for the Washington Post. A few years back, one of his Post commentaries drew a stinging retort from a future vice president named Al Gore.
As state climatologist, Michaels also publishes the Virginia Climate Advisory, a sassy newsletter aimed at 4,000 weather junkies around the state that's part record-keeping, part forecasting, but mostly pure Pat.
The highlight is a section called "The Current Wisdom" where Michaels, with a schoolboy's glee, debunks both fellow scientists and the news media's coverage of science, especially when it comes to dire warnings of global warming.
"His favorite pose is the little boy who says the emperor has no clothes on," says Dallas Peck, who heads the U.S. Geological Survey.
That drives some fellow scientists nuts. "He certainly has an interesting and lively and engaging presentation," says Michael Oppenheimer, a senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund in New York.
And that's what makes Michaels so troublesome to environmentalists. "Pat is not a crank," Oppenheimer concedes; he's taken seriously by environmentalists, even if they disagree with everything he says.
Which makes some of Michaels' supporters around the state, and country, suspect that maybe politics, and not finances, had something to do with UVa's decision to quit funding his office.
"I really wonder," says Julie Bishop, project manager for an environmental engineering firm in Newport News, "because the things he has in the advisory certainly go against the grain of a lot of environmentalists."
University officials insist that's not so; they say they were backed into a fiscal corner and have had to cut many public-service programs. But some of Michaels' colleagues don't just wonder, they're pretty much convinced - especially since Michaels found out about the funding cutoff on Nov. 4, the day after the presidential election. They see the long arm of Al Gore reaching out to Charlottesville to strike back at his global-warming adversary. Or something like that.
"Pat is one of the most highly visible scientists in the global-climate debate," says Jerry Taylor, director of natural sciences for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington where Michaels is a fellow. "It seems rather shocking that the University of Virginia is severing a relationship with someone like that."
Even if there is no political correctness conspiracy at work, the funding cutoff has sent a chill through the ranks of climatologists around the country, Taylor says.
"There are many scientists who are afraid to do what Pat has done [in discounting reports of global warming], because they're afraid they'll be ostracized or lose their grants." Now, Taylor warns, their fears appear to have been borne out.
Taylor wanted to write an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal blasting the University of Virginia, but Michaels caught wind of his plans and squelched them. For once, the irrepressible Michaels would rather keep things quiet, in hopes his supporters in the business community will be able to work things out in the legislature.
Nevertheless, to hear Taylor talk, the university's reputation for academic freedom is resting on whether the General Assembly decides to reinstate the funds.
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