Gathering of contrarians takes on 'climate alarm'

By Andrew C. Revkin
Published: March 9, 2009

NEW YORK: More than 600 self-professed climate skeptics are meeting in New York this week to challenge what has become a broad scientific and political consensus: that without big changes in energy choices, humans will dangerously heat up the planet.
The three-day International Conference on Climate Change - organized by the Heartland Institute, a nonprofit group seeking deregulation and unfettered markets - brings together conservative campaigners, scientists, a former astronaut and the president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus.
Organizers say the discussions, which began Sunday, are intended to counter the Obama administration and Democratic lawmakers, who have pledged to tackle global warming with legislation requiring cuts in the greenhouse gases that scientists have linked to rising temperatures.
The participants hold a wide range of views on climate science. Some concede that humans probably contribute to global warming, but they argue that the shift in temperatures poses no urgent risk. Others attribute the warming, along with cooler temperatures in recent years, to solar changes or ocean cycles.
But large corporations like Exxon Mobil, which in the past financed the Heartland Institute and other groups that challenged the climate consensus, have reduced support. Many such companies no longer dispute that the greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels pose risks.

Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, said that Exxon and other companies were shifting their stance to improve their image. The Heartland event, he said, was the last bastion of intellectual honesty on the climate issue.
But Kert Davies, a climate campaigner for Greenpeace who is attending the Heartland event, said that the experts giving talks were "a shrinking collection of extremists" and that they were "left talking to themselves."
Organizers expected to top the attendance of about 500 at the first Heartland conference, last year. They also point to the speaker's roster, which includes Klaus and Harrison Schmitt, a geologist, Apollo astronaut and former senator.
A centerpiece of the 2008 meeting was the release of a reportexpressly designed to challenge reports from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
This year, the meeting will focus on a more nuanced question: "Global warming: Was it ever a crisis?"
Most of the talks at the meeting will challenge climate orthodoxy. But some presenters, including prominent figures who have been vocal in their criticism in the past, say they will also call on their colleagues to synchronize the arguments they are using against plans to curb greenhouse gases.
In a speech Sunday, Richard Lindzen, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a longtime skeptic of the mainstream consensus that global warming poses a danger, first delivered a biting attack on what he called the "climate alarm movement."
There is no solid scientific evidence to back up the models used by climate scientists who warn of dire consequences if warming continues, he said. But Lindzen also criticized widely publicized assertions by other skeptics that variations in the sun were driving temperature changes in recent decades. To attribute short-term variation in temperatures to a single cause, whether human-generated gases or something else, was erroneous, he said.
Speaking of the sun's slight variability, he said, "Acting as though this is the alternative" to blaming greenhouse gases "is asking for trouble."
Fred Singer, a physicist often referred to by critics and supporters alike as the dean of climate contrarians, was to run public and private sessions Monday aimed at focusing participants on which skeptical arguments were supported by science and which were not.
"As a physicist, I am concerned that some skeptics (a very few) are ignoring the physical basis," Singer said in an e-mail message.
There are notable absences from the conference this year. Russell Seitz, a physicist from Cambridge, Massachusetts, delivered a speech at the meeting last year. But Seitz, who has lambasted environmental campaigners for distorting climate science, now warns that the skeptics are in danger of doing the same thing. The most strident advocates on either side of the global warming debate, he said, are "equally oblivious to the data they seek to discount or dramatize."
John Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama who has long publicly questioned projections of dangerous global warming, most recently at a House committee hearing last month, said he had skipped both Heartland conferences to avoid the potential for "guilt by association."
Many participants said that any division or dissent was minor and that the global recession and a series of years with cooler temperatures would help in fighting changes in energy policy.
But several climate scientists who are seeking to curb greenhouse gases strongly criticized the meeting. Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University and an author of many reports by the UN panel, said, after reviewing the text of presentations for the Heartland meeting, that they were efforts to "bamboozle the innocent."
Yvo de Boer, head of the UN office running the meetings leading to a new global climate treaty, said, "I don't believe that what the skeptics say should provide any excuse to delay further" action against global warming.
But he added: "Skeptics are good. It's important to give people the confidence that the issue is being called into question."