Posted by Dee Norris
Mark your calendars.
The 2009 International Conference on Climate Change returns to New York City on March 8th, 2009.
The 2009 International Conference on Climate Change will serve as a platform for scientists and policy analysts from around the world who question the theory of man-made climate change. This year’s theme, “Global Warming Crisis: Cancelled,” calls attention to new research findings that contradict the conclusions of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
Last year’s conference was reported to be a great success and you can access the audio and video recordings of presentations made at the 2008 conference Web site.
Distinguished scholars from the U.S. and around the world have addressed these questions seriously and without institutional bias. Their findings suggest the Modern Warming is moderate and partly or even mostly a natural recovery from the Little Ice Age; that the consequences of moderate warming are positive for humanity and wildlife; that predictions of future warming are wildly unreliable; that the costs of trying to “stop global warming” exceed hypothetical benefits by a factor of 10 or more; and more.
Often, these scholars have been ignored, and often even censored and demonized. They have been labeled “skeptics” and even “global warming deniers,” a mean-spirited attempt to lump them together with Holocaust deniers. The truth of the matter is that these scholars dissent from a false “consensus” put forward by a small but politically powerful clique of government scientists and political allies.
Actual surveys of climate scientists and recent reviews of the scholarly literature both show the so-called “skeptics” may actually be in the majority of the climate science community. They do not lack scholarly credentials or scientific integrity, but a platform from which they can be heard. Their voices have been drowned out by publicity built upon the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an entity with an agenda to build support for the theory of man-made catastrophic global warming.
This year promises double the attendance as in 2008 and the esteemed Anthony Watts is a confirmed speaker.
I plan on attending. Do you?
Confirmed Speakers
| Name | Affiliation |
| Dennis Avery | Hudson Institute |
| Joseph Bast | The Heartland Institute |
| Robert Bradley | Institute for Energy Research |
| Bob Carter | James Cook University (Australia) |
| Frank Clemente | Penn State University |
| John Coleman | KUSI-TV – San Diego |
| Joseph D’Aleo | International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project |
| David Douglass | University of Rochester |
| Myron Ebell | Competitive Enterprise Institute |
| Michelle Foss | University of Texas – Center for Energy Economics |
| Fred Goldberg | Royal School of Technology (Sweden) |
| Laurence Gould | University of Hartford |
| William Gray | Colorado State University |
| Chris Horner | Competitive Enterprise Institute |
| Craig Idso | Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change |
| David Legates | University of Delaware |
| Jay Lehr | The Heartland Institute |
| Marlo Lewis | Competitive Enterprise Institute |
| Richard Lindzen | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Ross McKitrick | University of Guelph |
| Christopher Monckton | Science and Public Policy Institute |
| Jim O’Brien | Florida State University |
| Tim Patterson | Carleton University |
| Benny Peiser | Liverpool John Moores University (United Kingdom) |
| Paul Reiter | Institut Pasteur (France) |
| Arthur Robinson | Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine |
| Joel Schwartz | American Enterprise Institute |
| S. Fred Singer | Science and Environmental Policy Project |
| Fred Smith | Competitive Enterprise Institute |
| Willie Soon | Science and Public Policy Project |
| Roy Spencer | University of Alabama at Huntsville |
| James M. Taylor | The Heartland Institute |
| Anthony Watts | Surfacestations.org |
Perhaps we can get Al Gore to speak so we are assured of cold weather.
Just an afterthought: As many of you know, Anthony does not receive funding for his work at www.surfacestations.org or here at WUWT. The funds to attend this conference will most likely come out of his pocket. Look to your right and you will see at little yellow Donate button under the SHAMELESS PLUG heading. WUWT gets over 10,000 views a day and if just 0.5% of this traffic contributes ten dollars apiece, we can entirely fund Anthony’s conference expenses. How about it? Do we walk the walk or just talk?
Rebellion against Leif…??????
opsss. Great scientist … the best on-line
I LOVE LEIF
Smokey (18:25:33:
Thanks for link Smokey, I do my best. Its funny I can read anything but spelling and grammar is not my forte. As most of you have noticed.
Steve Hempell says
Well It sure hasn’t been CO2 either for 250 years. So what might you suggest it is?
I would suggest natural variation. New data strongly suggests that the LIA was not caused by the sun. Likewise, the first part of the 20th century warming was not caused by the sun. And then there was the MWP and the Roman Warming and so on.
It seems to me that the most obvious explanation is natural variation.
What I don’t get is why everyone wants to believe there must be some specific mechanical causation. Why think that climate works mechanically?
It seems to me that the evidence is pretty strong that climate like weather behaves “chaotically.” Or rather – it is scale-free – it exhibits Long Term Persistence because of self-similar processes.
This alone leads to natural variation in its mean behavior just like we see.
Now, I would agree that there are also mechanical aspects operating that can drive climate into one regime or another – like the milankovich cycles perhaps. And, yes, perhaps CO2 and solar cycles can have some minor effect. But the bigger effects (absent something like major orbital changes) are simply going to be natural oscillations.
Unfortunately, we are all caught up in the “mechanical metaphor” and it is very hard to see things this way. We want a specific mechanical causal explanation. And we say such things like, “well, it must be CO2 because we can’t explain it any other way.” What is left out of that statement is…”’cause we can’t explain it any other way… mechanically.”
Now, don’t get me wrong. The “mechanical metaphor” is a powerful metaphor that has given us great prosperity and much learning. Our entire technology base comes from this. But it is simply a metaphor. It is a map, it is not reality. Reality is a bit more complicated.
There’s always that 3rd alternative… It’s not the sun, it’s something else out there affecting the sun and the earth at the same time. I believe there is someone with a plausible argument of how – on one of these conservative think-tank sites. Will he ever publish it?
[…] Watts Up With That? […]
Patton
State-controlling dictators have come from both left and right but please don’t descend into the Hitler analogy. Fascism was neither left nor right – Franco being more to the right and Mussolini being more to the left. Hitler’s party was actually opposed by the official Socialist party and the Communist party who were both encouraged by Trotsky to join forces to defeat him. And real socialists were among the first to be murdered by the Nazis. It’s not really too hard to find a statist, right-wing dictator. There have after all been dozens of them. But if you really want to use another big-name dictator who murdered purely out of flawed lefty ideology, I recommend Pol-Pot.
OK, Anthony, $10 it is. Have a good trip (others helping, too, of course.)
VOTE ! this election is not a done deal, and…if for no other reason than to clear your consience in a few years.
What an interesting time be be alive.
And $10 from the Lone Star State.
How come neither candidate has campaigned here?
@richard Patton (18:34:22):
Hitler was a Statist and his particular brand of Statism was Facism, not Socialism regardless of the use of National Socialism to appease the German Worker. Stalin was also a Statist, but his brand was State Capitalism disguised as the Communism of Lenin which in turn was a forced maturation of the Socialism of Marx (Lenin believed one could force Joe Six-pack to jump directly into Communism without an intervening period of Socialism to empower the worker).
A ‘Statist’ is an individual supports the power of the State over the rights of the Individual. Facism, Socialism, Communism, State Capitalism are all forms of Statism – control by the State over the free association of Individuals to pursue one’s own economic best interests.
Libertarianism is the anti-thesis of Statism in that Libertarians believe in the smallest State possible to maintain society. The State’s powers should be limited to External Defense, Domestic Security and Judicial – basically, Military, Police and Courts. The Anti-Federalists of U.S. Constitutional Debates would undoubtedly have considered themselves Libertarians had the concept existed. More at http://www.lp.org.
Who is John Galt, anyhow?
AEGeneral (16:55:12) :
Near as I can figure without actually bothering to look up the rules,
Cancelled would have a soft ‘e’ and the accent on the second syllable.
Canceled would either have the accent on the first syllable and a soft ‘e’ (i.e., the accepted US spelling and pronounciation) or the accent on the second syllable and a long ‘e’.
Hence, “transferring” has the accent on the second syllable.
Also, it’s millennium, as millenium (like selenium) has a long ‘e’ in the second syllable.
And, while I’ve joined the pedants, etc. is short for et cetera, not etcetera.
And so on.
Either ‘canceled’ or ‘cancelled’ is correct.
can⋅cel
/ˈkænsəl/ [kan-suhl]
verb, -celed, -cel⋅ing or (especially British) -celled, -cel⋅ling, noun
Origin:
1350–1400; ME cancellen < ML cancellāre to cross out, L: to make like a lattice, deriv. of cancellī grating, pl. of cancellus; see cancellus
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cancelled
Dee Norris – very interesting – I like that. How would you characterize the american progressives of the 1920’s and 30’s? Were they Statists? And if so – what sort?
Nah. Well, maybe if you’re prone to addiction. I tired it a couple times when I was young (both parent smoked for a long time, and my Sister smoked until recently). Never figured out what the appeal was. Of course I never figured out what the appeal of drugs and alcohol was either, and yes I tried some of both, long ago.
Either ‘canceled’ or ‘cancelled’ is correct.
Yes. There are quite a number of alternate spellings of various words in English. In practical terms, Spellcheck is narrowing it down, however!
E.g., Seperate/Separate. Partly thanks to Spellcheck, the latter is now heavily preferred. In the case of “canceled”, Spellcheck likes a single “l”.
Also, many compound words are now being “split”, thanks to Spellcheck.
Other than the fact that it’s conservative, and has a role sponsoring these conferences on climate change, I know very little about the Heartland Institute. This editorial by its president, Joseph Bast, on Paulsen’s meeting with bankers on October 15, is informative
It’s entitled: “At Moment of Truth, Where Was Dagny Taggart?”
http://www.heartland.org/article.html?articleid=23982
Why load it on Dagny? It was Midas Mulligan’s turf, wasn’t it?
The Heartland Institute must be a bit libertarian leaning to invoke Ayn Rand.
Maybe John Galt works for them.
How come neither candidate has campaigned here?
No sense in it. Far more bank for the buck in the swing states.
@richard Patton (22:01:01):
During the Progressive era, one of the single largest leaps forward in the growth of the American State was the 17th Amendment to the Constitution – The enabling of the federal government to directly tax the citizens. Many progressives were socialists, such at Upton Sinclair. Others like John D. Rockefeller, Jr. are harder to pigeon hole. Henry Ford certainly tried to run the lives of his workers both on the clock and off. If any word summed up the Progressives, it would be Paternalism. It was the State’s responsibility to be the parent to the citizen.
By the end of the Progressive era In the 1920s and especially into the 1930s, there was a growing sense that capitalism had failed. FDR, contrary to some popular theories, did not usher in socialism to American society. FDR was a believer in Paternalism and left the US with a legacy of paternalistic programs such as Social Security. When today we speak of the United States as having a mixed economy, I see it as Capitalism/Paternalism (the Nanny State) rather than Socialism.
During the 30s in Weimar Germany, not only was there the belief that capitalism had failed, this was coupled with a notion that democracy was also a failure (in Europe, democracy was a still new thing with some notable prior failures). Out of this social demoralization arose the NAZI party promising to be a middle ground between Capitalism and Communism and it explains the willing acceptance of the German people to Hitler’s dictatorship.
Statism, in any form, should always be resisted as it is the natural tendency of the State to grow in power at the expense of the rights of the Individual.
I know this nice Gulch if any one cares to join me.
Re: “canceled” vs. “cancelled”. I’m either having trouble reading today, or my tools are lying to me. WordWeb here at home is now claiming that two Ls is the British spelling, and one L is the US spelling. I’d swear that at the office, WordWeb was claiming exactly the opposite. I either have two different versions installed and there was an error, or I simply misread the entry earlier.
Either way, I was wrong. (And there’s proof I’m a skeptic… I have yet to hear any of the AGW cultists use that phrase.)
I would agree that a US conference should prefer the US spelling… but it is also a tempest in a teapot, and I should probably not have stirred it…
At least no one is trying to bring up any of the wildly silly attempts to regularize the spelling of English that have been popular(ish) from time to time!
Vincent Guerrini Jr (18:40:16) :
I find this a very compeling graphical demonstration that indeed the sun is responsible for earth climate change(s)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sunspot_Numbers.png
The black line is not the temperature curve, but simply the smoothed sunspot number curve. Note that solar activity was pretty much the same during the following four intervals:
1610s, 1760-1795, 1830-1870, 1970-present. Yet, there seems to be general consensus [apart from hysterical hockey stick fans] that the temperatures were very different during those times. This does not seem to be compelling evidence, to me at least, that the Sun is the primary driver. It takes considerably more than that.
John Philip (11:59:23) :
REPLY: Heartland did at one time, take some research money from Exxon but does no longer. I asked the same questions last year as a condition of my attendance.[…]- Anthony
I take this as a strong indication that my assertion that funding sources and motives are important. I would personally have asked the same question and possibly been even more strict in my conditions.
Pet Rock (18:20:52) :
Leif sure has an ability to provoke debate!
I’m just trying to run up the web stats for the blog. 🙂
iceFree (17:50:48) :
I have heard that many did people did not want their names on the IPCC reports either. It cut’s both ways.
I can give some names, can you?
Fernando (18:54:33) :
I LOVE LEIF
Ssshhhh. don’t tell my wife…
Ed Scott (17:35:04) :
the WUWT forum where you will always be welcome but not always agreed with.
And I don’t ask to be agreed with. I will debate what I from my point [and with my specific knowledge] perceive as misconceptions or errors. Not for the benefit [or whatever] to the ‘debatee’ [who will seldom change his tune, no matter what I say] but to benefit the wider readership, should they care to listen to me.
Derek (16:10:33) :
err, not exactly your best thread this one.
Your true colours springs to mind.
Quick, go tell Tamino that. Maybe he’ll let me in again.
I have to side with Leif here but not for the same reasons. What you will get is this, the Climate change folks bringing up exactly the same point Leif made earlier. If there is any hint of big oil in the picture you open the door for the the entire thing to be discounted solely on the point that its hosted by someone who get money from big oil. In the minds of the Climate change folks you might as well as been sponsored by the devil.
A lot of excellent science has been entirely discounted by them in this same manner. It will become the point of contention, not anything you say or do at the conference. In other words your message will be lost behind protests that you are just another tool of big oil to stall the movement so they can squeeze their last dollar out of us.
I have heard of The Heartland Institute. So has Greenpeace apparently they link to this http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php?id=41
But by the time the conference happens I bet the its not really happening faction will have grown big and strong:0
@Ross Berteig (01:37:34)
Don’t sweat the small stuff. I learned long ago not to rely on spell checkers or on-line dictionaries too much. When writing things other than quickie comments, I use the computerized services for a first draft. But when I do a final proof read {which often takes much more time than the original writing} I use a couple of very big, hardcover American dictionaries. As for the spelling of the past tense of cancel, it is shown as -celed or celled.
Ross Berteig
British English spelling differs from American in the following ways, to name a few:
1. BrE: -ise; Ex.: organise
AmE: -ize; Ex.: organize
2. BrE: -our; Ex.: honour
AmE: -or; Ex.: honor
3. BrE: -amme; Ex.: programme
AmE: -am; Ex.: program
4. BrE: -ogue; Ex.: catalogue
AmE: -og; Ex.: catalog
5. BrE: -yse; Ex.: analyse
AmE: -yze; Ex.: analyze
6. BrE: -re; Ex.: centre, metre
AmE: -er; Ex.: center, meter
7. BrE: -ence; Ex. defence
AmE: -ense; Ex. defense
The British also write “sceptic”.
Then you have different vocabulary:
BrE: loo; AmE: bathroom
tin / can
boot / trunk
hood / bonnet
tap / faucet
maths / math
cooker / stove
queue / line
bloke / guy
etc.
It doesn’t really bloody matter how you write it. Choose one ot the other.
The trend is that the Brits are adopting more and more US English, and not the other way around…thanks to all the US TV sitcoms, movies and music and flooding the UK. I think our British chaps in this forum here may have some comments on this.