By Dan Miller, Heartland

John H. Sununu, former governor of New Hampshire and chief of staff under President George H.W. Bush, delivered a keynote address to the largest-ever gathering of climate change “realists” in New York City this morning.

Sununu is among the 80 speakers and more than 800 scientists, economists, and policy experts confronting the subject of global warming at the second International Conference on Climate Change, hosted by The Heartland Institute and 60 cosponsoring organizations.

“Since basic hard science is more difficult to bias, they [resort] to modeling,” Sununu said of those who crusade for the theory of man-made global warming. “And since critics will take the time to examine their assumptions, they make the models big, obscure, and full of complex feedback structures much too abstract to debate in a public forum.

“In the past,” Sununu said, “when [alarmists] tried some of this on population explosion and global starvation, or global cooling, or their Malthusian vision of a world running out of resources, they were thwarted by nature and technology. Over time, we are confident that nature will thwart them again. Their computer model-generated output may give them the result they want for press releases, but nature is not impressed.”

The full text of Sununu’s remarks is available online.

By Dan Miller, Heartland Institute

Environmentalists--even mainstream environmentalists such as Al Gore--are less concerned about any crisis posed by global warming than they are eager to command human behavior and restrict economic activity, the president of the Czech Republic told the second International Conference on Climate Change here Sunday.

Vaclav Klaus, who also is serving a rotating term as president of the European Union, triggered the approving applause of about 600 attendees as he said, “Their true plans and ambitions: to stop economic development, and return mankind centuries back.”

Klaus was one of three presenters Sunday evening as the largest-ever gathering of global warming skeptics kicked off a 2 1/2 day conference confronting the issue, “Global warming: Was it ever really a crisis?’ Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute, which produced the conference, and Richard Lindzen, a leading meteorologic physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earned prolonged applause with their presentations as well.

But Klaus was the hit of the evening as he declared that the global warming alarmists he has encountered “are interested neither in temperature, carbon dioxide, competing scientific hypotheses and their testing, nor in freedom or markets. They are interested in their businesses and their profits--made with the help of politicians.”

While Klaus hit hard at what he called the political rent-seekers, he earned another round of applause as he said alarmists are “not able to explain why the global temperature increased from 1918 to 1940, decreased from 1940 to 1976, increased from 1976 to 1998, and decreased from 1998 to the present, irrespective of the fact that the people have been adding increasing amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.”

Klaus scoffed at politicians who urge radical actions to reduce carbon dioxide emissions through various schemes, such as taxing current to benefit future generations and being “generously altruistic” in restricting the pace of business activity in their economies.

He declared, “We could have made such far-reaching decisions only on the absolutely unrealistic assumption that we know all relevant parameters of the future economic system.”

He concluded to a standing ovation by saying, “It is evident that the environmentalists don’t want to change the climate. They want to change our behavior ... to control and manipulate us.”

MIT’s Lindzen told the audience that global warming alarmists have been encouraged by some scientists who in Lindzen’s opinion do credible work on global warming, but who nevertheless endorse global warming because in so doing, it “just make their lives easier.”

He said, “The fact that they can make ambiguous or even meaningless statements that can be spun by alarmists, and that the alarming spin leads politicians to increase funding, provides little incentive to complain about the spin.”

He cited three scientists by name who fall into this broad category--colleagues Kerry Emanuel and Carl Wunsch, and Wally Broecker.

This politicizing of climatology, he said, “has had an extraordinarily corrupting influence” because the science that attracts funding doesn’t deal with climate “but rather with the alleged impact of arbitrarily assumed climate change.”

One practical way to counter this trend, he urged, “would be to undermine the authority of scientific organizations” through mass resignations in which “thousands of scientists [would] resign from professional societies that have taken unrepresentative stands on the global warming issue.”

Heartland President Bast opened the conference on an optimistic note, declaring that the nearly 700 registrants at the conference and the 80 presenters “demonstrate ... the breadth and high quality of the support that the ‘skeptical perspective’ on climate change enjoys.”

Bast said if the scientific community were persuaded that the consequences of global warming were catastrophic, “perhaps no price would be too high to pay to save the Earth.”

But he added that several surveys of scientists show the majority don’t believe the Earth is in a global warming crisis or that what warming has occurred was caused by human activity.

“On the question that might matter most,” he declared, “climate scientists are perfectly split over whether they know enough about global warming to turn it over to policymakers to take action.”

Even among global warming skeptics, agreement is far from conclusive on the severity and causes of global warming, a situation Bast says demonstrates “that it is the skeptics, not the true believers, who are more likely to discover and publicly discuss the true science and economics of climate change.”

By Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe

SUPPOSE the climate landscape in recent weeks looked something like this:

Half the country was experiencing its mildest winter in years, with no sign of snow in many Northern states. Most of the Great Lakes were ice-free. Not a single Canadian province had had a white Christmas. There was a new study discussing a mysterious surge in global temperatures - a warming trend more intense than computer models had predicted. Other scientists admitted that, because of a bug in satellite sensors, they had been vastly overestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice.

If all that were happening on the climate-change front, do you think you’d be hearing about it on the news? Seeing it on Page 1 of your daily paper? Would politicians be exclaiming that global warming was even more of a crisis than they’d thought? Would environmentalists be skewering global-warming “deniers” for clinging to their skepticism despite the growing case against it?

No doubt.

But it isn’t such hints of a planetary warming trend that have been piling up in profusion lately. Just the opposite.

The United States has shivered through an unusually severe winter, with snow falling in such unlikely destinations as New Orleans, Las Vegas, Alabama, and Georgia. On Dec. 25, every Canadian province woke up to a white Christmas, something that hadn’t happened in 37 years. Earlier this year, Europe was gripped by such a killing cold wave that trains were shut down in the French Riviera and chimpanzees in the Rome Zoo had to be plied with hot tea. Last week, satellite data showed three of the Great Lakes - Erie, Superior, and Huron - almost completely frozen over. In Washington, D.C., what was supposed to be a massive rally against global warming was upstaged by the heaviest snowfall of the season, which paralyzed the capital.

Meanwhile, the National Snow and Ice Data Center has acknowledged that due to a satellite sensor malfunction, it had been underestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles - an area the size of Spain. In a new study, University of Wisconsin researchers Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonis conclude that global warming could be going into a decades-long remission. The current global cooling “is nothing like anything we’ve seen since 1950,” Swanson told Discovery News. Yes, global cooling: 2008 was the coolest year of the past decade - global temperatures have not exceeded the record high measured in 1998, notwithstanding the carbon-dioxide that human beings continue to pump into the atmosphere.

None of this proves conclusively that a period of planetary cooling is irrevocably underway, or that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are not the main driver of global temperatures, or that concerns about a hotter world are overblown. Individual weather episodes, it always bears repeating, are not the same as broad climate trends.

But considering how much attention would have been lavished on a comparable run of hot weather or on a warming trend that was plainly accelerating, shouldn’t the recent cold phenomena and the absence of any global warming during the past 10 years be getting a little more notice? Isn’t it possible that the most apocalyptic voices of global-warming alarmism might not be the only ones worth listening to?

There is no shame in conceding that science still has a long way to go before it fully understands the immense complexity of the Earth’s ever-changing climate(s). It would be shameful not to concede it. The climate models on which so much global-warming alarmism rests “do not begin to describe the real world that we live in,” says Freeman Dyson, the eminent physicist and futurist. “The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand.”

But for many people, the science of climate change is not nearly as important as the religion of climate change. When Al Gore insisted yet again at a conference last Thursday that there can be no debate about global warming, he was speaking not with the authority of a man of science, but with the closed-minded dogmatism of a religious zealot. Dogma and zealotry have their virtues, no doubt. But if we want to understand where global warming has gone, those aren’t the tools we need. Read full story here.