We’re almost done with my series of reports on the International Conference on Climate Change, which was organized by the Heartland Institute and held in Washington DC earlier this month.

I’ve ended up serializing this into a series of reports, and this is the final one in the series; you can find Parts I, II, III, and IV here, here, here, and here.

As foreshadowed at the end of Part IV, this final installment contains some comments on remarks by Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), Ben Liebermann of the Heritage Foundation…. and a “closer” of the caliber of Jonathan Papelbon - Lord Christopher Monckton.

More below the fold.

Read More →

We’re still rumbling along with the stories that came out of the International Conference on Climate Change, which was organized by the Heartland Institute and held in Washington DC a couple weeks back.

Given the volume of material, I’ve ended up serializing this into a series of reports. This is Part IV; you can find Parts I, II, and III here, here, and here.

As noted in Part III last Friday, Part IV contains the thoughts of University of Alabama/Huntsville climatologist Prof. Roy Spencer, some comments from Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), and (a RedState exclusive!) a few items from my interview and conversation with Steve Milloy - founder of junkscience.com and the author of the recently-issued book, “Green Hell.”

More below the fold.

Read More →

Your humble correspondent was in Washington last week to cover the most recent (Third) International Conference on Climate Change, which was organized by the Heartland Institute.

This is the second in what will be a series of reports on the event; you can find Part I here, and Part II here.

As foreshadowed on Wednesday, in this part we’ll look at economic issues - with comments from Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), David Tuerck of the Beacon Hill Institute, and Prof. Gabriel Calzada of King Juan Carlos University in Spain.

More below the fold….

Read More →

Your humble correspondent was in Washington last week to cover the most recent (Third) International Conference on Climate Change, which was organized by the Heartland Institute.

This is the second in what will be a series of reports on the event; you can find Part I here.

As promised last Friday, in this part we’ll discuss the release of the massive report by the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), and get some gems of wisdom from Anthony Watts, Fred Singer, Willie Soon, and Harrison Schmitt.

More below the fold….

Read More →

As has been noted in a few other spots during this week, your humble correspondent was in Washington earlier this week to cover the most recent (Third) International Conference on Climate Change, which was organized by the Heartland Institute.

For those of you who have asked, “The last one was in March - are these quarterly now?”…. the answer is, no. Given the recent effort to steamroller “cap-and-trade” legislation through Congress at flank speed - on the grounds that “climate change” is accelerating catastrophically (sic) - a decision was made to quickly have an event in Washington to get some other views onto the table, literally within sight of the Capitol dome.

In contrast to its two-day predecessors, this was a one-day event that ran on one single track (rather than multiple tracks). The content was also more strongly oriented toward the political aspects of the issue - which was the intent given the venue and recent happenings.

My notes are rather extensive, so I thought I’d adopt the strategy that Jay Nordlinger uses when he covers events like Davos for NRO - a serialization in reasonably-sized parts until the supply of material runs out.

So that’s what I’ll do - and Part I begins below the fold.

Read More →

Due to a scheduling misunderstanding on my part (largely relating to the notion of “lunch” being an extended session) when I made my travel plans, I had to leave the ICCC event last Tuesday before its conclusion (to catch my flight home).

Thus, I sadly missed this barn-burner of a closing address by Christopher Monckton.

“Great Is Truth, and Mighty Above All Things”

It’s a great Sunday-morning read….

Today was the final (half) day of the 2009 ICCC, followed by flying home; I promised to toss up a few thoughts, which I’ll keep terse and to the point. Once I get caught up on other things (including some sleep), I’ll try to provide some more over-arching thoughts on it all. But for this evening, I just want to note highlights along the lines of…. things that were new today.

Read More →

Just a quick wrap-up, since I’ve done fairly well today with keeping up with things, particularly in the morning.

The two late-afternoon presentations I went to involved metrology and methods. They were marvelous.

Read More →

o A single modern nuclear reactor has the generating capacity of two Hoover dams.

o The present (Holocene) warming period has lasted for 13,000 years - which, in the present cycling of ice ages and interglacials, is longer than usual; it’s not unreasonable to assume that a new Ice Age may start within the next 1,000 years.

o On Svalbard Island north of Norway, polar bear bones from 110,000 to 130,000 years ago have been found; the polar bears have clearly survived many tens of thousands of years of wild “climate change.”

o In 24 of the 50 states, the all-time high temperatures occurred in the 1930s.

o For Des Moines, Iowa, for the record June and July high temperatures, 33 of 61 occurred in the 1930s.

o In 2008, there were 266 days with no sunspots.

o The notion that ice cores represent “instant canning” of air is badly flawed - just in general (as snow settles and is compressed, the air is squeezed out) and in the handling of those cores.

o The EUniks have (off-the-record) told grant applicants that their main interest in environmentally-related topics is that they “want science that supports environmental taxes.”

As promised, here’s the Tom McClintock interview.

Link here, if that doesn’t work. As you can see, Rep. McClintock isn’t precisely shy about speaking his opinion, particularly when it comes to the religious aspect of global warming. I had originally written “essentially religious aspect” there, but when thinking about it McClintock was pretty unambiguous on that point, so neither should I be when describing him. If you don’t have time for the whole thing, the Congressman’s main theme was that it’s of primary importance that ordinary citizens get involved and stay involved in this issue.

Read More →

We’re working hard here. We had to be up early and ready for things to start over breakfast at 7 this morning.

There were two keynotes over breakfast, and then we split into tracks; I was in a “science” track and encountered some interesting things which I’ll enumerate below.

Read More →

Congressman Tom McClintock (R, CA-04) started off his comments at the ICCC breakfast session with reminding us about RFK Jr’s comment that global warming skeptics are quite a number of things, up to and including traitors. Not wanting to die a traitor’s death, McClintock then claimed that he came up with global warming long before Al Gore… in the third grade, when he noticed the entire dinosaur / mammoth thing in the local museum. Alas, his grade school teacher never wrote him up for the Nobel Prize.

Read More →

Well, Moe and I are sitting in the media room at the ICCC in New York, following the evening’s dinner and opening talks. Moe videoed Vaclav Klaus’ talk, and then left to wrestle with getting the video uploaded for processing.

I took extensive notes this evening. The events consisted of opening remarks by Heartland Institute President Joe Bast, main addresses by the President of the Czech Republic (and for the first half of this year, “rotating” President of the European Union) Vaclav Klaus and MIT Sloan Professor of Meteorology Richard Lindzen, and then a long Q&A session involving both men.

Both speakers were great; President Klaus is a formidable man.

Read More →