Big Week for Global Warming & Climactic Change Carnival Barkers

It's been a big week for the perennially indignant Global Warming/Climate Change crowd.

Last weekend's "largest ever demonstration for civil disobedience over climate change" in Washington DC, featuring NASA scientist Jim ("Coal plants are factories of death") Hansen, along with hundr...thous...no, millions of protesters, was threatened by predictions of 12 inches of snow. Actually, less than a thousand showed up in the snowstorm to hear such working class heroes as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. call for energy company executives to be in jail "for all eternity." The protest was held at the gates of the Capitol Power Plant with the goal of "shutting down" their coal-fired boiler. The plant opened as usual Monday morning.

Columnist Christopher Booker reports that Britain's Met Office, which has been one of the UK's biggest sources of global warming hysterics for two decades, was forced to admit that this was Britain's coldest winter in 13 years. This after predicting that 2007 would be the warmest year on record globally (whereupon global temperatures plummeted 1° Celsius and wrecking all of those predictive computer models), and stubbornly sticking to their guns with a similar prediction for 2009.

Brendan O'Neill's column on Spiked-online.com reports:

This weekend, the University of West England is hosting a major conference on climate change denial. Strikingly, it’s being organised by the university’s Centre for Psycho-Social Studies. It will be a gathering of those from the top of society – ‘psychotherapists, social researchers, climate change activists, eco-psychologists’ – who will analyse those at the bottom of society, as if we were so many flitting, irrational amoeba under an eco-microscope. The organisers say the conference will explore how ‘denial’ is a product of both ‘addiction and consumption’ and is the ‘consequence of living in a perverse culture which encourages collusion, complacency and irresponsibility’. It is a testament to the dumbed-down, debate-phobic nature of the modern academy that a conference is being held not to explore ideas – to interrogate, analyse and fight over them – but to tag them as perverse.

Leading green writers have welcomed the West England get-together to study the denying masses. One eco-columnist says the conference might generate ideas for dealing with those who are ‘pathologically’ opposed to the environmental movement..

At the Wall Street Journal's California Economics conference, Nobel prize collector Al Gore refused to answer questions from reporters, but was questioned during his presentation by the audience. Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” asked for the opportunity to debate Gore over his many global warming claims of urgency to curb greenhouse gasses. Gore declined the offer.

“I want to be polite to you,” Mr. Gore responded. But, no. “The scientific community has gone through this chapter and verse. We have long since passed the time when we should pretend this is a ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ issue,” he said. “It’s not a matter of theory or conjecture, for goodness sake,” he added

.

How dare anyone question him? He wouldn't have become an ex-senator worth over $200 million and an investor in a private equity firm that stands to make billions on its environmental scare tactic investments if he didn't know what he was talking about!

What got very little press, unfortunately, was the Heartland Institute's 2009 International Conference on Climate Change this weekend in New York. It's theme was "Global Warming: Was It Ever Really A Crisis?" Eight hundred were expected to attend the conference, including more than 70 presenters:

•Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic and of the European Union. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he declared, “Environmentalism and the global warming alarmism is challenging our freedom. I’m afraid that the current crisis will be misused for radically constraining the functioning of the markets and market economy all around the world.”

•American astronaut Dr. Jack Schmitt--the last living man to walk on the moon--a geologist Ph.D. who has contended he has seen “too many of [my] colleagues lose grant funding when they haven’t gone along with the so-called political consensus that we’re in a human-caused global warming.”

•William Gray, Colorado State University, who claims global warming alarmists have hijacked the American Meteorological Society.

•Richard Lindzen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the world’s leading experts in dynamic meteorology, especially planetary waves.

•Stephen McIntyre, primary author of Climate Audit, a blog devoted to the analysis and discussion of climate data. He is a devastating critic of the temperature record of the past 1,000 years, particularly the work of Michael E. Mann, creator of the infamous “hockey stick” graph. That graph--thoroughly discredited in scientific circles--supposedly proved that mankind is responsible for a sharp increase in greenhouse gases.

•Arthur Robinson, curator of a global warming petition signed by more than 32,000 American scientists, including more than 10,000 with doctorate degrees, rejecting the alarmist assertion that global warming has put the Earth in crisis and is caused primarily by mankind.

•Willie Soon, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

•Roy Spencer, University of Alabama at Huntsville, principal research scientist and team leader on NASA’s Aqua satellite.
Don Easterbrook, professor of geology at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, who will present new data showing “the most recent global warming that began in 1977 is over, and the Earth has entered a new phase of global cooling.”

Of course, the fact that Mars, Jupiter, Pluto, Neptune's moon Triton and other bodies in our solar system show identical warming trends with the Earth couldn't possibly mean the Sun has anything to do with climate change.

And here I thought Al Gore said the debate was over?