Global Warming Conference Heats Up in May 2010

CHICAGO, IL USA – What a difference a year makes! Last year at this time, global warming “skeptics” were dismissed as being a fringe group of dissenters from “the overwhelming consensus” of scientific opinion. Now, their critics are admitting that the science is far from settled and that global warming is not the crisis it was once made out to be.

Recent months have seen the collapse of international negotiations for a global warming treaty in Copenhagen, revelations of scientific fraud committed by a leading climate research organization, and demands for the resignation of the chairman of the United Nations’ global warming panel. British and Canadian newspapers are declaring the end of the global warming “fraud.”

The first major international meeting of global warming “skeptics” since Copenhagen, Climategate, and other extraordinary developments will take place in Chicago on May 16-18, 2010. It is the fourth such conference convened by the nonprofit Heartland Institute and scores of allied organizations, and it promises to be the largest and most consequential yet.

More than 70 of the world’s elite climate scientists and economists, including two former NASA astronauts and scientists from 15 countries, are scheduled to speak at the event, which is open to the public. Among the confirmed presenters are climate scientists Dr. Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama at Huntsville and economists Dr. Robert Mendelsohn of Yale University and Dr. Gabriel Calzada of King Juan Carlos University in Madrid.

Other international luminaries include Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov of the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, Dr. Fred Goldberg of the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, Dr. Helen Roe of Queens University in Belfast, and Dr. Garth Paltridge of the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Oceans Studies in Australia.

“These past six months have not been good for the alarmist camp,” understated James M. Taylor, senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute and manager of the conference. “Emails disclosed by a whistle-blower at Britain’s University of East Anglia show that key climate data supporting the purported crisis from rising global temperatures were doctored or manipulated, and scientists with contrary data were ignored or blackballed from peer-reviewed journals.”

Additionally, Taylor noted, the cap-and-trade scheme to tax carbon emissions is dead in the U.S. Senate. The chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change–whose reports are the bible of the global warming alarmists–has lost support from key allies for conflicts of interest, and they are demanding his resignation. A majority of the public in the U.S., Britain, and around the world does not believe global warming is man-made or is likely to be a crisis.

“It’s time to step back and reconsider what we know and what we don’t know about the science and economics of global warming–especially the costs and benefits of proposed regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Taylor said. “The Fourth International Conference on Climate Change will do exactly that.”

Some 800 scientists, economists, public policy experts, opinion leaders, elected officials, and journalists are expected to attend the conference, which opens with a keynote address Sunday, May 16, and concludes Tuesday afternoon, May 18, at the Marriott Hotel on Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago.

For further information about registration, the program, and speakers, go to
www.globalwarmingheartland.org.

Todd Wynn is the climate change and energy policy analyst at Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market public policy research organization.