Everyone from Al Gore to Yvo de Boer, the head of the United Nations climate program, has said that the debate over global warming is over. The folks at the Heartland Institute didn’t get the message.With the slogan, “Global Warming Is Not a Crisis,” the think tank (which between 1999 and 2005 was funded by ExxonMobil) kicked off a two-day conference this morning in New York to debunk what it calls a “fake consensus” on the human causes of global warming.
The conference program, featuring a slate of scientists and politicians, is a familiar litany of arguments against climate change orthodoxy, and includes panels exploring everything from the Medieval Warm Period to the failures of the Kyoto Protocol to the impact urban heat islands have on temperature change. Today, the conference released its rebuttal of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, arguing that global warming isn’t as bad as commonly made out, isn’t caused by humans anyway, and doesn’t merit expensive schemes to combat it.
But the real heat comes from the conference taking place at all. Many in the blogosphere consider global-warming skeptics like those on parade in midtown Manhattan to be at best flat-earthers and, at worst, paid shills for the oil industry. More >>>
