The 2009 International Conference on Climate Change opened in New York City Sunday night with addresses by the Honorable Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, and Dr. Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The conference is sponsored by the Heartland Institute, and both the institute and conference participants dispute the claim that the world is faced with and must respond to a global-warming crisis.
Klaus, who currently is also president of the European Union — a rotating duty among EU country leaders — holds a Ph.D. in economics and began his political career 20 years ago with the fall of communism. Both he and Professor Lindzen, often mentioned by the climate alarmists as the “last skeptic,” challenged the global-warming alarmists to publically debate the issue. It was noted that less than half of Americans now think warmer temperatures are caused by anthropogenic (human-caused) forcings and, remarkably, only 11 percent of Czech citizens believe in anthropogenic warming.
Attendance at the conference is approximately double the 400 that attended the debut of the event last year. In contrast with the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change dominated by government-paid scientists, most attendees — from about 40 countries — are here at their own expense. The conference is divided into four tracks: Paleoclimatology, Climatology, Climate Change Impacts, and Economics & Politics. In total, there are 80 presenters from dozens of climate related disciplines.
Monday’s keynote speakers included California Congressman Tom McClintock and astronaut and former Senator Harrison Schmitt, Ph.D. Closing the program on Tuesday are the Honorable John H. Sununu, Ph.D., Australian scientist Bob Carter, and Lord Christopher Monckton from the U.K.
Considering the amount of publicity the major media give to global-warming alarmists, it would be reasonable to expect that this conferernce of reputable scientists presenting the other side of the story would be a top news story. Yet the major media have thus far given this conference relatively little publicity.
Photo of Vaclav Klaus: AP Images
