This year’s ICCC was co-sponsored by 32 organizations. In his opening address, Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast recognized the Media Research Center, Cornwall Alliance, Science and Environmental Policy Project, Heritage Foundation, Competitive Enterprise Institute, CFACT, and the George C. Marshall Institute. These seven organizations stepped forward to nominate award recipients and organize the award ceremonies to honor professionals willing to speak out against global warming alarmism.
The conference had panels featuring prominent scientists discussing the latest physical science about global warming and the failure of models to predict climate change, dwindling polar ice caps, etc. Economists and policy experts explained the social benefits as well as the social costs of fossil fuels, the futility of spending trillions of dollars attempting to stop uncertain and perhaps unknowable climate changes a century from now, and the need to repeal the bad energy policies and other policies that were adopted at the peak of the global warming scare and are now understood to be unnecessary, costly and counterproductive.
This conference is a project of the Heartland Institute’s Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, which produces an ambitious program of research and educational projects in defense of free-market environmentalism. The world needs voices devoted to sound science and market-based, rather than government-based, solutions to environmental problems, Bast explained. The Heartland Institute helps find and amplify those voices.
Bast made an interesting comparison between alarmists and skeptics. Alarmists see what they believe, he said, while skeptics believe what they see. Alarmists think every change in the weather is evidence of a human impact on climate, and a human impact is necessarily bad. They believe only government can solve big problems, and man-made climate change would be the biggest problem ever discovered. Skeptics look at the data and see no warming for 17 years, no increase in storms, no increase in the rate of sea level rise, no new extinctions attributable to climate change, in short, no climate crisis. Rather than defend the science behind their cause, global warming alarmists typically claim “the debate is over” and demonize their critics.
According to Bast, the U.S. federal government spent $22.5 billion on global warming in 2013. It has spent $200 billion over the past 20 years. “By one estimate, the world is spending $1 billion a day on projects that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for global warming alarmism,” Bast said. “All this spending has created a global warming industry that marginalizes, demonizes, and sometimes outright attacks the thousands of scholars and other professionals willing to speak out against a popular delusion.” To see what took place at the conference, visit: http://climateconference.heartland.org/
