Global Warming Skeptics Sponsor Their Own Climate Change Conference

It's called, The 2009 International Conference on Climate Change and bills itself as "the world’s largest-ever gathering of global warming skeptics." The conference, whose theme is “Global warming: Was it ever really a crisis?,” runs from Sunday, March 8 and concludes Tuesday, March 10 in New York.

Produced by The Heartland Institute and 57 (mostly conservative leaning) co-sponsoring organizations, the conference is "devoted to answering questions overlooked by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change." [Oddly enough, a scan of the program didn't turn up anything that hadn't already been covered by the IPCC.] According to the Heartland Institute's press release for the event, "the IPCC concluded global temperatures may already have reached crisis proportions, and that human activity was a key driver in raising temperatures, primarily because of the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere." Not surprisingly, the participants of this conference say they will present "a substantially different viewpoint."

The Heartland Institute indicates that there will be over 70 speakers at the event, including as you might expect some of the usual skeptics like S. Fred Singer, Willie Soon, Lord Monckton, etc., as well as the founders of various conservative and skeptic think tanks like Fred Smith of the Competetive Enterprise Institute and Joseph D'Aleo of ICECAP. The most notable speaker is the Honorable Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic (and currently President of the EU by virtue of the rolling 6-month EU presidency structure). Trained as an economist before going into politics, President Klaus has expressed his dissatisfaction with various scientific pursuits, including global warming and the new REACH chemical control legislation in Europe.

It will be interesting to see what science might come out of the conference and whether it impacts the consensus that human activity has contributed to the increased rate of global warming.