UPDATE: see an additional report from Prof. Bob Carter below the “read more” line.
ALSO: See this announcement at Climate Audit
Photo by Evan Jones
I don’t have a lot of time to blog about today’s conference. You can see the agenda here.
Highlights today: I spent about a half hour meeting with Steve McIntyre. Some improvements to the Climate Audit website will be coming soon. See this announcement at Climate Audit
Frequent contributor and moderator Evan Jones came by too. As always it is a pleasure to see him.
Attendance doubled from last year. 400 last year, 700 for the dinner tonight with another 100 tomorrow registered.
I shared a table tonight with John Coleman, Joe D’Aleo, Art Horn, Alexandre Aguiar of Metsul Brazil, James Waters, Peter Leavitt, and Steve McIntyre. The presentations from Vaclav Klaus and from Richard Lindzen were enlightening. I particularly liked Lindzen’s presentation and I hope to have a copy to share here. UPDATE: His speech is here
Despite what critics have said about the conference, it was well attended by a wide variety of people from the US, Canada, Britain, and the EU. A number of elected officials were in attendance. Tomorrow Congressman Tom McClintock from California will be speaking. For those that stick by the tired old fallacy that the conference is funded by “Big Oil” to that I say you are quite wrong. Rebuttal here and list of sponsors
I discovered that WUWT has quite a following, and I was mobbed by people after the dinner presentation. It was an odd feeling.
UPDATE: Professor Bob Carter also has a nice account which I’m reposting here:
Heartland-2: session one
March 9, 2009
President Vaclav Klaus reports latest poll from the Czech Republic: only 11% of people believe that man has a significant influence in warming the climate.
West Australian Joanne Nova’s Climate Skeptics Handbook launched, and a 150,000 print run announced.
“We will win this debate”, says Dr Richard Lindzen, “for we are right and they are wrong”.
The opening session of the Heartland-2 Conference opened with a bang here in Manhattan tonight [Sunday evening March 8, 2009]. With registrations of around 700 persons, the conference is almost twice the size of its predecessor last year. The audience for the two opening plenary talks, held over dinner, included an eclectic mixture of scientists, engineers, economists, policy specialists, government representatives and media reporters. 
In welcoming delegates, and opening the conference, President of the Heartland Institute Joe Bast also launched two new publications. The first, by Anthony Watts, is a summary of his extensive studies of the weather stations at which U.S. surface temperatures are measured (“Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable”), which have revealed that many stations are scandalously poorly sited for their intended purpose. The second, “The Skeptic’s Handbook”, by Joanne Nova from West Australia, is a succinct and well illustrated briefing paper that summarizes accurately the evidence against dangerous human-caused warming in a humorous and easily understood format.
The first Plenary Address was given by President Vaclav Klaus, who is President of both the Czech Republic and (for a 6 month current term) the European Union. His talk was greeted, both before and after, with standing ovations. 
In response to a question, he reported a just-released Czech poll, which shows that only 11% of persons questioned in a recent poll believe that man has a significant influence in warming the global climate.
The President commenced his talk by commenting that little change had occurred in the global warming debate since his talk, 12 months earlier, at the Heartland-1 conference. He likened the situation to his former experience under communist government, where arguing against the dominant viewpoint falls into emptiness. No matter how high the quality of the arguments and evidence that you advance against the dangerous warming idea, nobody listens, and by even advancing skeptical arguments you are dismissed as a naïve and uninformed person.
The environmentalists say that the planet must be saved, but from whom and from what? “In reality”, the President commented, “we have to save it, and us, from them”.
Klaus reported his discouragement at participating in meetings with other senior politicians at Davos and within the EC. Here, he finds that not one other head of state who will make common cause in support of a rational assessment of the scientific evidence. Instead, all believe that the summaries provided by the IPCC represent the scientific “truth” on global warming.
But the climate data do not support the theory of human causation; the IPCC summaries therefore do not represent science, but instead environmental politics and activism. As a result, large and highly organized rent seeking bureaucracies and groups have emerged, and they further propagate the climate alarmism that is now in their self-interest.
President Klaus professed to be puzzled by the environmentalists’ approach to technical progress. It as if they “want to stop economic progress and take mankind centuries back”, he said. Applying their ethic of “saving the world”, western electorates are being asked for the first time in history to abandon successful current technologies before new technologies have been developed to replace them. Klaus stressed that there is no known, feasible way in which modern technological society can be run based on present sources of renewable, clean, green energy.
The second Plenary Address was delivered by Dr Richard Lindzen of MIT, an acknowledged world leader in atmospheric physics and a doyen of meteorological science.
Dr Lindzen started by making the important observation that being skeptical about dangerous human-caused global warming does not make one a good scientist, and nor does endorsing global warming necessarily make one a bad scientist.
He then pointed out the professional difficulties that are raised for many skeptics when scientists whose research they respect nonetheless endorse global warming. In most such cases, however, the science that such persons do is not about global warming in the strict sense. It’s just that supporting global warming makes their life, and especially their funding life, easier.
Thus, it is a particular problem for young scientists to oppose the prevailing alarmist orthodoxy, because to do so is to cruel their chances of receiving research funding. For as long as it is the AGW spin that attracts the research funds, for so long will there be a strong disincentive for most scientists to question the hypothesis in public.
Lindzen commented that the politicization of the AGW issue has had an extraordinarily corrupting influence on science. Most funding that goes to global warming would not be provided were it not for the climate scare. It has therefore become standard to include in any research proposal the effect of presumed AGW on your topic, quite irrespective of whether it has any real relevance or not.
Lindzen asserted that it boils down to a matter of scientific logic against authority. The global warming movement has skilfully co-opted sources of authority, such as the IPCC and various scientific academies. For instance, over a period of 20 years, the US Academy of Science has had a backdoor route for the election of environmentalists as Members of the Academy. The success of this tactic is indicated by the fact that the current President of the Academy (Ralph Cicerone) was elected that way and is a strong environmentalist.
But in giving an endorsement of alarm about climate change, the NAS, as well as similar societies in other countries, has never polled their own expert membership. Rather, the pro-alarm policy statements that are issued by various professional societies express the views of only the activist few, who often control the governing Council.
Despite the manifold problems of combating the alarmist climate message, Dr Lindzen concluded his talk with the rousing observation that in time the climate rationalist cause will win. “When it comes to global warming hysteria”, he said, “neither gross ignorance nor even grosser dishonesty has been in short supply. But we will win this debate, for we are right and they are wrong”.
During an extended question and answer session after the conclusion of the two plenary addresses, Drs Klaus and Lindzen were in close agreement about two things.
The first, is that global warming hysteria is being fomented as part of an environmentalist ideology; it is a politically organized movement. The grip that this hysteria now has on public opinion is explained partly by the fact that there is no equivalent, politically organized movement to mount a defense of sound science. Instead, there is simply a collection of persons who are united mainly by their common affront at the gross abuse of science that is going on.
The second common viewpoint was expressed in response to the question “What arguments are the most effective to promulgate the skeptics’ cause of building policy, not on authority, IPCC or otherwise, but on sound science”.
Both President Klaus and Dr Lindzen agreed that the most important arguments were (i) that sound science demonstrates that human increases in carbon dioxide are not going to cause dangerous global warming, and (ii) that a thorough cost-benefit analysis must be applied to all potential policy options.
For those on all sides of the argument accept that the Kyoto Protocol, despite its high cost, will do nothing towards measurably reducing global temperature; and the public need to be informed that the same is true also for the more ambitious carbon dioxide cuts mooted under cap and trade legislation. If taxpayers are to fund the operation, then it is only fair that they be told that the considerable pain, which will run to many trillions of dollars, will be for no measurable gain.
It was not expected that new science would be presented at the opening Plenary Session of Heartland-2. What participants got, instead, were inspirational messages delivered by two inspirational leaders of the climate rationalist cause.
Bob Carter
Bob Carter’s preliminary article on Heartland-2 here
SOURCES:
The full text of President Klaus’ speech will be posted on the websites of the Climate Science Coalition:
http://www.climatescienceinternational.org/
http://www.nzclimatescience.org/
As this article went to press, an account of the Heartland-2 meeting by Andrew Revkin appeared in the New York Times. Reading it is an interesting exercise in spot-the-spin.
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Just been looking at the programme for the Heartland Conference. One of the things which struck me was the long list of free market/libertarian groups involved. Being a bit of an all-round sceptic, not just a climate sceptic, this got me wondering. Why does this link exist?
“Heartland is not a scientific research organization. In recent years, it has been providing a platform for the so-called “sceptics” in the global warming debate because (a) it’s apparent that advocates of more government power exploit the public’s scientific illiteracy to advance their agenda…” (The Heartland Institute)
Which comes first: the chicken or the egg? Some sceptics (as in the case of the Heartland Institute) seem to believe that there are certain people who, per se, want governments to have more and more power and therefore support the idea of catastrophic global warming caused by human activity. They probably think that Lord Shaftesbury wanted to ban children being employed down the mines because he thought that governments did not have enough power or that the Clean Air Act was passed just to increase the power of governments. It could, however, be that certain people believe that there is such a thing as human-induced global warming and therefore support government action to deal with it. Why do people’s motives always have to be seen as underhand – whether it is ‘libertarians’ objecting to taxes or ‘liberals’ wanting more taxes?
A person’s right to smoke cigarettes is not without its social costs. It is a waste of human resources as people die from smoking-induced cancer (or is that just another example of ‘advocates of more government power exploit(ing) the public’s scientific illiteracy to advance their agenda’) and because resources are used to treat people who suffer from smoking-induced cancer. The public’s taxes are used to treat people who suffer from smoking-induced cancer and so everybody has an interest in reducing the incidence of smoking. I support the view I have just stated and therefore support government policies aimed at reducing smoking. But I don’t do so just because I want a bigger and bigger government.
It is a pity that the whole debate about AGW seems to have got caught up in an entirely separate debate about the proper role of government in a modern democracy. Why is it that there is such a close link between climate scepticism and free-market/libertarian philosophy? And which comes first? Is it that free marketeers/libertarians like the idea of climate scepticism because it helps their political aim of smaller government? Or is it that, it just so happens, free marketers/libertarians all take exactly the same view of climate science? (And, yes, exactly the same point could be made about the people on the other side: Which comes first in their case: a left-wing political philosophy or a certain view of climate science? (Well, OK, David Cameron is not exactly left-wing – although going by some of the comments posted on blogs some American thinkers might think that he is a dangerous ‘liberal’.)
As to the public, their choice seems to lie between accepting the views of ‘respectable’ political bodies such as the UN and the views of ‘respectable’ scientific organisations on the one hand, or a bunch of climate sceptics who are ‘outcasts’ (their own term) in the scientific community and are closely linked to a bunch of free market/libertarian pressure groups. What kind of a choice is that? No wonder, a poll in today’s Scotsman reports that only 7% (of people surveyed) reject the idea of global warming (by which, probably, they mean AGW because that’s the only form of global warming the majority of people hear about).
Is it the case that people who have a free market/libertarian view will always be able to take a ‘correct’ view of science while people on the other side of the political debate cannot avoid taking an ‘incorrect’ view of science? What else explains the politics/science connection? Maybe people with a free market/libertarian outlook are born with a gene that always leads them to understand science ‘correctly’. And people on the other side are born with a gene which always makes them misunderstand science. (Just in case anybody is choking over their Corn Flakes and thinks I’m making a serious suggestion – forget it.) But with few exceptions the overlap between view of AGW and political leanings is uncannily close and there must be some explanation. As someone who teaches politics and economics I find it fascinating.
Finally, the Heartland Institute says that most of its money comes from ‘Foundations’. But where do the ‘Foundations’ get their money from? I looked up the website of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and could find no list of donors. It’s difficult to believe that all of its $5 million comes from donations by individuals with modest incomes. (I’m not suggesting that anyone’s been bought by anybody else but let’s have all the information before we start rejecting claims made by other people.)
That should set the cat among the pigeons. Meanwhile, the following story in “The Scotsman” has been causing a fair bit of amusement:
“THE Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall began their ten-day tour of South America yesterday with the issue of climate change at the top of their agenda.
Prince Charles and Camilla arrived in Chile, but they will also visit Brazil, Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands. Highlighting the issue of global warming is a major theme, and this week the prince will give a dire warning on climate change to the world.
Their chartered Airbus arrived at Comodoro Arturo Merino Benitez airport close to Santiago. They were driven away in a limousine, followed by a motorcade of six cars.”
Wondering if the Scotsman put those last two sentences in deliberately.
“”” DJ (14:10:52) :
>Thanks DJ for that illuminating information. I can file it away along with the Resume of the UN’s IPCC chief climatological Guru, Pachauri, who I believe is trained as a railway engineer.
Pachauri doesn’t claim or pretend to know better than the climate experts who publish. “””
Then why is he appearing before the US Senate committee on environment and Public Works, and presenting himself as an expert; why doesn’t he send his UN IPCC “Climate Experts” instead.
The Senate Committee, is already up to speed on the global politics of MMGWCC and the UN’s stance; but what they are lacking is some training on the Physics of what is going on; and that Pachauri can’t help them with; yet ehy won’t invite scientists to come and talk to them, and the One they did invite Frof Happer from Princeton Department of Physics; Barbara Boxer dismissed as having received research grant moneys from Exxon Mobil. Who has more vested interest in getting the science correct on MMGWCC; Barbara Boxer, or Exxon Mobil; who it just so happens also contributes to Boxer’s re-election campaigns.
“”Mike Ryan (14:21:52) : “”
Mike, why would you presume that Government has a vested interest in curbing smoking; as distinct from expressing their displeasure with smoking; while taking advantage, of that very drug addiction to tax the hell out of the victims caught in that trap, but simultaneously hoping they kick the bucket before they reach Social Security age.
If government really believed smoking was bad, they would let them sell them to kids, and make them more potent; to spare the world from another generation of tobacco junkies who pollute the air more than exhaling CO2 does.
We need to force the separation of politics from science otherwise you’ve got the same situation as uniting church and state.
From his ICCC remarks, McClintock’s advice to climate skeptics:
“If you’re sitting in [your legislator’s] office and you’re talking to them, you’re in exactly the wrong place,” McClintock said. “If you want to communicate with your legislator, don’t write them a letter. Write that same letter to the local newspaper or put it on a blog. Mention them by name, how they’re voting and ask them those inconvenient questions.” (bold emphasis added)
http://www.businessandmedia.org/articles/2009/20090309101821.aspx
Have at it, guys and gals.
TonyS (04:39:01) :
FALSIFICATION OF THE ATMOSPHERIC CO2 GREENHOUSE EFFECTS WITHIN THE FRAME OF PHYSICS
GERHARD GERLICH; RALF D. TSCHEUSCHNER
Page 275 – 364
Preprint v4 here…
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0707.1161v4
DaveE.
Brilliant stuff, truly deserved Anthony. What an arena. I don’t think I’d sleep if I was there. Piers Corbyn too. What a feast. Good luck.
Some of you may be aware that I post on the comment section of the Guardian’s Environment section. I have never resorted to ad hominem attacks even though I am frequently attacked by a small clique of Alarmists.
Well, today I was posting some hard facts about how unreliable surface temperature monitoring stations are and that historical data is contaminated by urban heat island effects and. in earlier times, dense urban smog which blocked sunlight.
I was repeatedly attacked and mocked for this but did not take the bait. They could not get me to resort to personal attacks.
I have just seen that the Guardian won’t let me post comments any longer. My post comment button has been disabled. Here is a screenshot to prove it.
http://img187.imageshack.us/my.php?image=32786956.jpg
This prompts me to believe that the anonymous comments from Alarmists were partly attributable to Guardian employees or that the Guardian does not want my views on 19th century temperature data being contaminated by smog to be posted any longer.
DJ (14:10:52) :
I’m guessing you are not a geologist by that statement. If you were you would realise the role of CO2 in geological temperature changes is well established.
As i understood it it had been established that co2 was following temp with the ice core samples… which admittedly is relatively recent history as far as a geologic time frame goes… but if we go further back in the paleonoclimate data, which is from sediment analysis we find that the only time atmospheric co2 has been this low in the past was during extended ice ages… the data is a bit sparse, but thats what it shows.
At the present the earth has been in an ice age for around 2.5million years, being punctuated with brief post glaciations, its generally believed that the position of the continents is what is responsible for this. At present we are due for another glacial period, as for temp vrs co2, here is a copy of the vostoc record, and you can see we are considerably cooler now than during the Holocene maximum(bronze age) even though co2 was significantly lower, http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/temp/vostok/graphics/tempplot5.gif And indeed shows that this “warm period” hasnt peaked as high as past warm periods. Hell we should be praying for our “childrens” sake that co2 does prevent the next glacial period!
Mike Ryan:
Perhaps that’s true in the US, but here in the UK the tax take from smoking amounts to many times what it costs to treat smoking-related disease.
It’s the same with carbon taxes – the tax we pay on fuel amounts to many times the ‘cost’ of our resultant emissions.
It’s all just a money-making scam.
Speaking of educational backround…
Is Jams Hansen a climatologist?
I’m not looking for the answer. I already know. Do the alarmist who are concerned with field of learning know?
DJ (14:10:52) :
I’m guessing you are not a geologist by that statement. If you were you would realise the role of CO2 in geological temperature changes is well established.
Yes, it’s minimal.
I wonder if Mary Hinge gets paid by the number of times she is addressed or her name is mentioned on WUWT. If so, this troll is making a fine living.
DJ (12:42:58) :
Lets also demand that the media cover the “Flat Earth Society conference”
I love statements like these. Lets correct it a little.
It was the majority of the educated that believed the earth was flat. The sceptics were proven correct.
It was the majority of the educated that believed the earth was the centre of the universe. The sceptics were proven correct.
It was the educated religious leaders that believed in creationism. The sceptics were proven correct.
It is the educated that believe in AGW. But, as always, the sceptics will be proven correct.
It seems that those who believe, always get proven wrong by the sceptics. I’m glad I’m a sceptic. I may be persecuted now, but ultimately, I will be proven correct.
On the NY Times blog :
It is obvious that Andrew Revkin is biased toward environmentalism. His wordsmithing that tries to make skeptics look agenda driven, while making himself look unbiased and sensible, is pretty well developed. He knows right where the belt line is and he hits below it very well, thank you very much.
That usually is the fatal fracture of writers like him : their continual beating of the “funded by Exxon” drum reveals their own agenda–and we didn’t need Houdini to point that out to us. I wonder if Revkin is concerned how much funding from petroleum companies David Suzuki gets?
I am reluctant to say this, but when Walt Meier pointed WUWT readers to Andrew Revkin I was a little taken aback…. anyway, I will continue to believe that Walt Meier is trying to be unbiased. It could just be he is stuck between an alarmist and a job security place.
——————–
Article about Exxon, AGW, and Newsweek :
page 1
http://www.newsweek.com/id/32312
page 2
http://www.newsweek.com/id/32312/page/2
And I’m willing to bet that less than any of the 700 attendees have published a science paper about human induced climate change, fairies, unicorns, leprechauns, goblins, orcs, dragons, ents, naiads, trolls, pixies, gryphons, or gnomes.
jorgekafkazar (15:58:27) :
And I’m willing to bet that less than any of the 700 attendees have published a science paper about human induced climate change, fairies, unicorns, leprechauns, goblins, orcs, dragons, ents, naiads, trolls, pixies, gryphons, or gnomes.
LMAO! You forgot those poor little hobbits!
Congratulations Anthony. Keep up the good work. Science will win out.
” … for we are right and they are wrong.”
Paul S writes:
While I agree with the sentiment, educated people (who tended to be quite clever back then) did not believe that the earth was flat. If I recall correctly, a Greek calculated the diameter of the earth to surprising accuracy using facts that only make sense if the world is a globe (close enough to).
I regularly notice that a lot of prominent skeptics are relatively old. And most old people I know (not all of them though) are quite entrenched in their patterns and beliefs, which makes them rather stubborn and inflexible.”
May your children adopt just such an attitude!
Buwahahahaha, it alway works!
Well none of those beasties bother me; it’s the true Nibelungs that concern me; for they have an agenda to control the world.
I’m guessing you are not a geologist by that statement. If you were you would realise the role of CO2 in geological temperature changes is well established.
Yep. Temps go up, followed by an increase in CO2 levels, on average of 800 years later. Even the good folks at RealClimate recognize this:
At least three careful ice core studies have shown that CO2 starts to rise about 800 years (600-1000 years) after Antarctic temperature during glacial terminations.
That doesn’t mean that CO2 can’t cause warming, but the burden of proof concerning a causal relationship is squarely on the shoulders of the Doomsday AGW’ers, and more and more peer reviewed studies are throwing doubt on the prospect of CO2 overriding natural variability anytime soon. Thank you for shopping at WUWT. Next please!
(Signed Mike, the former Geology Student.)
Richard Sharpe (16:17:11) :
While I agree with the sentiment, educated people (who tended to be quite clever back then) did not believe that the earth was flat. If I recall correctly, a Greek calculated the diameter of the earth to surprising accuracy using facts that only make sense if the world is a globe (close enough to).
Actually, I agree with you. It is the sentiment I was after. I believe a number of Greeks over a large period of time calculated that the earth was a sphere and eventually to the conclusion of its diameter. If I remember rightly, Aristotle and Plato had a say, but the diameter was calculated, I believe by Eratosthenes.
However, Eratosthenes was criticised by his peers on a number of occasions, notably by Hipparchus on the above topic. It just goes to show, you can’t please all of the people all of the time.
Off topic, but has the tornado season started early over in the US?
Do you want to start with the ‘unprecedented’ ice melt of the 1930’s, or the Viking colonisation of Greenland back in the 9th century, or perhaps you would enjoy reading how the Romans maintained their empires by marching over high level passes now closed by ice? Perhaps information on the Bronze age warm periods when the ancient civilisations first flourished as the climate warmed, then collapsed as they cooled, would be more up your street?
Myself and others here are quite happy to pass on facts rather than conjecture Neven, or you might prefer to read Al Gores 1992 book ‘Earth in the Balance’ who enumerated all these past warmer events. Perhaps you only saw ‘An Inconvenient truth’ by which time Al seems to have conveniently forgotten his earlier book?
Best regards Neven
TonyB
Now Tony, you ol’ geezer, your age is showing badly. Don’t bother the young whippersnapper with history or facts. The goracle hath spoke. Don’t trust anyone over…er, 50.
-psi — who is 50 and therefore to be trusted.