Book Forum 

# *Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media*

(Cato Institute, 2004)

Date and Time 

November 18, 2004 12 - 2 PM EST 

Location 

1st floor/Wintergarden 

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##### Featuring 

Featuring the author **Patrick J. Michaels**, Senior Fellow, Cato Institute, Professor of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia; with comments by **Sallie Baliunas**, Harvard University; and **Marlo Lewis**, Competitive Enterprise Institute. 

Why is news about global warming always bad? Why do scientists offer such dire predictions about the future of the environment? Pat Michaels says it’s only natural, because of the way we do science today, where issues compete with each other for funding from a monopoly provider: the federal government. This leads to a culture of scientific exaggeration and a political community that takes credit from having saved us from certain doom—a doom played out nightly on the network news. *Meltdown* details hundreds of misstatements and exaggerations propagated by the professional community on the issue of climate change, including several scientific papers in major journals that were wrong at the time they were published, all consistent with the notion of what Michaels calls “predictable distortion.”

[Patrick Michaels’s Powerpoint Presentation](https://cdn.cato.org/archive-2004/michaels-11-18-04.ppt)

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