Once upon a time, the weather dons at the University of Virginia had to convince everyone of the worthiness of climate study. Even the U.S. government had determined that climate was not important, and in 1973 called it quits. Virginia’s federally funded climatology program, then located at Virginia Tech, got the pink slip.

At U.Va., the fledging Department of Environmental Sciences eyed the doomed program with a prospector’s zeal. Here was a chance to add some muscle to the department, raise its visibility. Three far-sighted faculty members—H. Grant Goodell, Bruce P. Hayden and Michael Garstang—persuaded University officials to let them give it a go.

So the government shipped its weather records up to Charlottesville from Blacksburg and a bulky satellite link was installed on the fourth floor of Clark Hall. Hayden, a young environmental sciences professor already saddled with a full teaching caseload and research contracts, became the first state climatologist, by appointment of the governor. For this esteemed post he received no pay.

Then, as now, the job straddled two worlds. The state climatologist was a University research position with a strong public service component, namely educational outreach. That U.Va. would assume this undertaking had a fitting symmetry.

"Weather geeks have existed in Virginia for a long time," Hayden says with a touch of smug humor. Thomas Jefferson was one of the nation’s earliest meteorologists, he notes, possessing a knowledge of climate that was far ahead of his time.

Jefferson wrote that an individual should be appointed in each state to keep track of temperature, and that these recordkeepers should meet every few decades to see whether the climate was changing. He also theorized that human economic activity could affect the climate. And on July 4, 1776, Jefferson reportedly took a break before signing the Declaration of Independence to pick up a shipment of thermometers, newly arrived from Europe.

In the 1970s, though, the attitude toward weather watching was somewhat cool. There was no such thing as the Weather Channel and climatology carried a dubious status. "Climatology was treated like an actuarial science, or like bookkeeping," Hayden recalls, "as opposed to a scientific process."

The pendulum soon swung the other way, however. The study of atmospheric science, once deemed negligible at the national level, has become critically important. Global warming, in particular, is a hotly debated and politically charged international issue. Climate change makes sensational news. Climatologists now perform key Advisory roles, to the state and beyond.

Reaching the masses

Today, the Virginia State Climatology office is indivisible from Patrick J. Michaels, who took over as state climatologist from Hayden in 1980. By that time, the workload had so increased that U.Va. decided to make it a separate, full-time position. Michaels arrived fresh from the University of Wisconsin with a doctorate in ecological climatology.

Under his leadership, the office’s public service dimension has grown dramatically, eclipsing all expectations. Much of that success has its roots in the Virginia Climate Advisory, a quarterly publication begun during Hayden’s tenure that has brought unforeseen attention to the University. Before it switched to an online format in 1999, the Advisory had 4,000 devoted subscribers worldwide. There were people on the mailing list who had never even been to the U.S.; they just found it a good read. Highly opinionated, caustic on occasion but always engaging, the Advisory relays a great deal of information without drowning the reader in data.

In 1994, at the urging of a local librarian who was a fan, Michaels entered it in a National Library Association competition. It was named among the 60 "best government information sources" in the world.

"It is, to our knowledge, the only publication devoted to climate and humor," says Philip "Jerry" Stenger (Col ’77), the climatology office’s research coordinator. Stenger has been Michaels’ assistant since 1982. He edits the Advisory, occasionally taking a red pen to his boss’s rhetorical excesses.

"The Advisory allowed me to discover something that I’d feared I’d possessed," Michaels says with thinly disguised glee, "which is the ability to write like a smart aleck and communicate scientific information at the same time."

Sitting at his desk, leg jiggling either with excitement or impatience, he whips on a headset to answer an incoming call. A reporter from Talk Radio Network wants an interview. Michaels talks like he writes, which is probably why the news media hound him: he is guaranteed to say something witty about the weather. In public citations, Michaels says he probably runs "neck to neck" with political analyst Larry Sabato (Col ’74), a fellow U.Va. faculty member.

Michaels can’t resist poking fun, even at his own kind. In an Advisory from last summer, titled "Not So Hot: Shortage of 90 Degree Days Prompts Little Complaining," he writes:

"We often caution Advisory fans that weather and climate types often act like they know more than they really do. This is probably endemic to human nature (read today’s paper, for example, explaining "why" the stock market did whatever it did), but for some reason weather people get to do an inordinate amount of explaining. In the case of the summer of 2000, confident explanations abound, but none actually suffice. Frankly, if we are so darned smart, why didn’t we forecast it ahead of time, instead of providing such glib post facto punditry?

So it’s not El Niño, La Niña, the Madden-Julian Oscillation, the PDO, and NAO (all trendy atmospheric oscillations that are the current rage in the climate profession), or for that matter, the AFL-CIO or NASDAQ. We don’t know why the jet stream did what it did over Northeastern North America in the summer of 2000."

The history of weather is a favorite and inexhaustible topic. The upcoming inauguration of President George W. Bush prompted a discussion in one Advisory of the coldest inaugural weather in recent memory. Another report featured an account of how weather has been treated in the media over the past century ("1904-05 continued the remarkable resignation towards weather-related deaths …").

Michaels and Stenger are understandably proud of the Advisory, a publication that appears to be an exception rather than the rule. Few of the country’s 49 other state climatology offices produce anything like it.

The office’s Web site (http://climate.virginia.edu) has gotten more than 68,000 hits since its launch in January 2000. By Michaels’ estimation, it is one of the University’s busiest sites. "We are second only to Alaska’s climatology office in Web traffic," Stenger adds.

But the office is much more than an Internet presence. A heavy volume of information requests pour in daily, averaging 3,000 to 4,000 a year. They come simple and complex. On any given day, a state agency requires a detailed data analysis; a soybean farmer needs last month’s rainfall totals; a builder wants advice about what size air-conditioning unit to install in a house; a journalist is seeking comment on the latest development in the global warming saga. There are always calls from the legal community, relating to investigations or pending litigation that involve a weather-related auto accident or personal injury. Their success lies in an ability to take the pertinent data and put it into layman’s terms. Over the years, Michaels and Stenger have been able to do it all quickly, and with élan.

Given that the operation consists of one faculty member, an assistant and "whatever money can be scraped up for graduate student support," says Michaels, the level of productivity is impressive.

For all that, the operating budget remains modest, as do the digs. Housed in a bunker-like space on a lower floor of Clark Hall, the office begs a fresh coat of paint. An assortment of mismatched furniture and bulging bookshelves attest to packrat tendencies. Half of one wall is taken up by a large dusty chalkboard, scrawled with formulas and equations. On the floor is a small tower of magnetic tapes on reels, a reminder of the days when the office used mainframe computers. Neither Stenger nor Michaels can bring themselves to discard them. ("High-priced Frisbees," Stenger says, shaking his head).

The Internet has replaced the satellite dish, long since dismantled. The climatology office now gets all its data online. In addition to the main information sources—the National Climatic Data Center and the Southeast Regional Climatic Center—new resources pop up every day. Part of their time is spent keeping track of it all.

Virginia’s weather is, well, Virginian, according to Michaels. Diverse, but genteel on the whole. Nothing in extreme. Our thunderstorms measure a three on a scale of 10. "It is hotter than blazes in the summer," he says after a moment’s consideration, "and the dew points here are pretty spectacular."

Champion of the anti-apocalypse

Michaels has no teaching duties as the state climatologist, but that doesn’t stop him. He frequently conducts graduate-level applied climatology courses. Over the years, he has taught a popular University seminar called "The Greenhouse Effect and Public Policy," which he designed to take undergraduates to the interface between the academy and cutting-edge issues.

But Michaels is better known for shaking things up beyond Grounds. His passionate views often land him squarely in the middle of controversy, and help to explain why he is considered the nation’s most popular lecturer on global warming, according to the journal Nature. If he’s not flying off to Queensland or Buenos Aires for a speaking engagement, he’s zipping around Virginia to give talks in his gas-electric Honda Insight with "COOLER" vanity plates.

He has been identified, he says, as the intellectual counterweight in a debate that has raged for more than a decade. According to Michaels, global warming has been vastly—and irresponsibly—overestimated. Observed global warming remains far below the amount predicted by computer models, which suggest that the Earth’s average temperature could rise by as much as 10.4 degrees during the next 100 years. That’s what the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change postulates, but Michaels disagrees.

"The most demonstrable fact is that the warming of the 21st century will be quite similar to the warming of the last third of the 20th century," he says. Those who have their hands on the real data every day—namely, professional climatologists—respond with strong skepticism to the picture of gloom and doom, he adds. The inflammatory statements about global warming are made, by and large, by people with no training in the field, he says, singling out former Vice President Albert Gore.

Michaels has made this explosive issue the subject of two books, Sound and Fury and The Satanic Gases. The latter, published last year by the CATO Institute, is already in its third printing.

"We found that the warming we are seeing is inordinately confined to the very cold air masses that inhabit Siberia and northwestern North America in the winter," says Michaels. "Seventy-eight percent of the warming is to cold air."

If the warming occurred during the heat of summer, the effect could indeed be devastating, with withered crops and increasing drought. But the fact that this phenomenon is largely limited to the cold air of winter means that global warming is a more benign process than originally thought, according to Michaels.

The direct warming effect of carbon dioxide—one of the chief gases that contributes to the greenhouse effect—also has been overrated, he says. The gas is increasing in the atmosphere at a rate below that of most climate-changing scenarios because it is being increasingly captured by growing vegetation.

"A lot of my research is centered around trying to find out what the error is in these computer models," he says. The consequences are great, as the projections made by these models are being used as the basis for sweeping policy recommendations, such as limiting carbon emissions.

Michaels himself has garnered significant financial support from industrial organizations with special interests in the emissions issue, such as the Western Fuels Association, a trade group of U.S. coal producers and suppliers. He’s also gotten research grants from the Cyprus Minerals Co., the Edison Electric Institute and the German Coal Mining Association.

While delighting his supporters and enraging his opponents, Michaels believes that his position as Virginia’s climatologist demands his involvement in issues of such enormous import. It is true to Jefferson’s expectation that the University’s faculty "would take their specialty and be involved actively in the political discourse of the time," he says.

Grooming the next generation

Over the years, many University students have done a stint in the Virginia State Climatology Office. For nearly all, it was their first exposure to this relatively esoteric field. "Climatology was not something your high school guidance counselor told you about," says Hayden. "Hopefully, a lot of them came to think that environmental sciences was respectable."

One former graduate student, John R. Scala (Grad ’84, ’90), has made a high-profile career of his weather obsession. Now the Weather Channel’s on-air severe storm analyst, Scala began his forecasting career at the state climatology office, providing taped forecasts to a local radio station. It was here that he experienced the drama of his first storm chases. "It was great fun," he says. "There was always something happening."

Scala got hooked on weather after taking a forecasting course taught by Michaels. He apprenticed from 1985 until 1990, cataloguing data, conducting damage surveys and generally honing his meteorological skills. Every day was different. The unchanging variable was Michaels’ tornadic energy and enthusiasm, and the kind of educational experience Scala wouldn’t trade for anything.

—MAURA SINGLETON, Uva alumni news, summer 2001

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