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Global Warming 'Hysteria' Is Claimed

By COLIN GUSTAFSON, Special to the Sun
March 4, 2008

A number of scientists and members of think tanks are rejecting the popular consensus that humans are causing global warming and that carbon gas emissions pose a mounting threat to environmental stability.

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Today, climatologists, economists, and free market advocates will gather in Time Square's Marriott Marquis Hotel for the final session of a three-day conference challenging what its sponsor, the Heartland Institute, calls the "public hysteria and alarmism about man-made" global warming.

"We have no power to affect global climate change, which will take us in whatever direction it may take us," a former business consultant, Christopher Monckton, said yesterday at the International Conference on Climate Change.

His remarks came shortly after a consortium of scientists released a report rebutting a U.N. panel's recent assertions that carbon gas emissions are contributing to the earth's current warming trend.

Far from being a product of human activity, this warming pattern is part of the climate's natural ebb and flow, the report's authors contend.

In their report, "Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate," a group of American university professors also argues that computer modeling technology cannot accurately predict changes in the climate system.

They also write that popular anti-global-warming campaigns have become "unnecessary, costly, and disruptive for energy security," as, in their opinion, carbon gas emissions pose a minimal threat to the climate.

Such assertions conflict with those of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has concluded that so-called greenhouse emissions are causing a rise in global temperatures and sea levels.

The panel's conclusions became popularized in Vice President Gore's 2006 documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," which was cited in the Norwegian Nobel Committee's 2007 decision to award him the Peace Prize.

At yesterday's conference, scientists derided Mr. Gore's film as a misleading work of fear-mongering "propaganda."

"What is being exploited in these doomsday scenarios" about climate change "is the ignorance of science in the general public," a former University of Winnipeg professor, Timothy Ball, said.

"It's very appropriate that it got an Oscar from the land of make-believe."

A spokeswoman for Mr. Gore, Kalee Kreider, dismissed those arguments as unfounded. "These groups try to obscure the scientific consensus that global warming is real," she said in a statement yesterday.

"There will always be deniers — there are still people who don't believe that we landed on the moon — but they really are on the fringe."

The president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, will be the keynote speaker this morning at the Heartland Institute's conference.


Reader comments on this article

TitleByDate

It doesn't take a brilliant scientist [135 words]

Para 

Mar 14, 2008 10:32

  Its the sun for the 100000000th time! [164 words]

Alex Barnett 

Mar 18, 2008 06:27

  huh? [281 words]

para 

Mar 18, 2008 13:42

  huh??? [127 words]

Alex Barnett 

Mar 18, 2008 17:00

  global warming propaganda [627 words]

para 

Mar 19, 2008 05:11

  global warming propaganda 2 [513 words]

Alex Barnett 

Mar 20, 2008 08:38

Next Door...Experts Prove Smoking Good for You! [94 words]

Not Fooled 

Mar 7, 2008 10:31

Experts [56 words]

Bill 

Mar 5, 2008 20:22

  Experts, huh? [105 words]

Dave 

Mar 6, 2008 11:04

Gore's 2 Big Lies told over and over , never challenged by the Drive-By Media [103 words]

Jefferson 

Mar 5, 2008 19:16

If its such an open-and-shut case , why won't Gore debate anyone [112 words]

jefferson 

Mar 5, 2008 19:04

I was a speaker at the Heartland conference [174 words]

William Briggs 

Mar 5, 2008 18:10

Human Global Warming is Nonsense [183 words]

Michael Merget 

Mar 4, 2008 16:36

GLOBAL WARMING, GLOBAL COOLING - Consensus? [35 words]

JAMES RAIDER 

Mar 4, 2008 14:40

  Politics and distortion are not solutions [196 words]

John House 

Mar 4, 2008 19:28

Burning Fuel = Carbon MONOXIDE not CO2 [149 words]

JC 

Mar 4, 2008 12:54

  7th Grade Science [74 words]

Jame Benenson 

Mar 4, 2008 22:24

  More middle school science: response to JC [136 words]

Bob Gardner 

Mar 5, 2008 08:29

  ccomplete combustion vs complete ignorance [109 words]

walrus 

Mar 9, 2008 16:45

This conference is paid with Exxon Money [15 words]

Daganstein 

Mar 4, 2008 11:29

  Exxon jibes are boring [142 words]

nevket240 

Mar 5, 2008 04:24

Don't hear much form Gore etc. [88 words]

J C Leary 

Mar 4, 2008 11:27

Man Made Global Warming a Con [48 words]

paul 

Mar 4, 2008 10:43

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