Senator James Inhofe
You should never underestimate the intelligence of the American people. Sadly, that is exactly what the promoters of man-made climate fears have been consistently doing, and the American people have consistently rejected climate alarm. Despite world-wide media frenzy, Americans remain as skeptical of global warming fears as they were in 1989 according to last years Gallup poll.
A previous Gallup Poll, released on Earth Day 2008, showed that the American public’s concern about man-made global warming is unchanged from 1989. The number of Americans who “worry a great deal” about man-made global warming remains practically unchanged from 1989 (35% in 1989 vs. 37% in 2008). After one of the slickest and most expensive climate change fear campaigns in our nation’s history, there is no change in global warming concern by Americans in the past two decades. This skepticism persists despite a Nobel Peace Prize jointly shared by former Vice President Al Gore and the United Nations climate panel. Skepticism persists despite an Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth. Skepticism persists despite a $300 million campaign by Gore to spread climate fears. Skepticism persists despite a daily drumbeat of scary scenarios promoted by the UN and the media of what could, might, or may happen a 20, 50, 100 or even 1000 years from now. In fact, global warming skepticism appears to have grown stronger as the shrillness of the climate fear campaign has intensified. The latest Gallup Poll, released March 11, 2009, further reveals the American public’s growing skepticism. Most telling, Americans ranked global warming dead last—eight out of eight - out of a list of environmental issues.
Not only does global warming rank last on the basis of the total percentage concerned either a great deal or a fair amount, but it is the only issue for which public concern dropped significantly in the past year.” “However, the solitary drop in concern this year about global warming, among the eight specific environmental issues Gallup tested, suggests that something unique may be happening with the issue. It is not clear whether the troubled economy has drawn attention away from the global warming message or whether other factors are at work” “Importantly, Gallup’s annual March update on the environment shows a drop in public concern about global warming across several different measures, suggesting that the global warming message may have lost some footing with Americans over the past year.”
“Since 1997, Republicans have grown increasingly likely to believe media coverage of global warming is exaggerated, and that trend continues in the 2009 survey; however, this year marks a relatively sharp increase among independents as well.” These dramatic polling results are not unexpected as prominent scientists from around the world continue to speak out publicly for the first time to dissent from the Al Gore, UN IPCC and media driven man-made climate fears. In addition, a steady stream of peer-reviewed studies, analyses, real world data and inconvenient developments have further refuted the claims of man-made global warming fear activists.
Americans are finally catching on in large numbers that the UN IPCC is a POLITICAL—not scientific organization. Man-made global warming fears have proven simply unsustainable - to use a nice green term. If new peer-reviewed studies are to be believed, today’s high school kids watching Gore’s movie will be nearing the senior citizen group AARP’s membership age (50 years) by the time warming allegedly “resumes” in 30 years! See: Climate Fears RIP…for 30 years!? - Peer-Reviewed Study Finds Global Warming could stop ‘for up to 30 years! Warming ‘On Hold?...’Could go into hiding for decades’ study finds - Discovery.com - March 2, 2009 -
Dr. John Brignell, a skeptical UK Emeritus Engineering Professor at the University of Southampton wrote in 2008: Professor Brignell wrote: “The warmers are getting more and more like those traditional predictors of the end of the world who, when the event fails to happen on the due date, announce an error in their calculations and a new date.” Furthermore, I have always believed that the more global warming information people have, the less concerned they will become. Confirming this unintended consequence is a study by the scientific journal Risk Analysis released in February 2008 which found that Gore and the media’s attempts to scare the public “ironically may be having just the opposite effect.” The study found that the more informed respondents “show less concern for global warming.” The study found that “perhaps ironically, and certainly contrary to… the marketing of movies like Ice Age and An Inconvenient Truth, the effects of information on both concern for global warming and responsibility for it are exactly the opposite of what were expected. Directly, the more information a person has about global warming, the less responsible he or she feels for it; and indirectly, the more information a person has about global warming, the less concerned he or she is for it. Read full testimony here.
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.”