Joseph L. Bast
Conference Host
President, The Heartland Institute
Opening Remarks delivered Sunday, March 2, 2008
Welcome to the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change.
This is a truly historic event, the first international conference
devoted to answering questions overlooked by the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change. We’re asking questions such as:
- how reliable are the data used to document the recent warming trend?
- how much of the modern warming is natural, and how much is likely
the result of human activities?
- how reliable are the computer models used to forecast future climate
conditions? and
- is reducing emissions the best or only response to possible climate
change?
Obviously, these are important questions. Yet the IPCC pays little
attention to them or hides the large amount of doubt and uncertainty
surrounding them.
Are the scientists and economists who ask these questions just a fringe
group, outside the scientific mainstream? Not at all. A 2003 survey of 530
climate scientists in 27 countries, conducted by Dennis Bray and Hans von
Storch at the GKSS Institute of Coastal Research in Germany, found
- 82 percent said global warming is happening, but only
- 56 percent said it’s mostly the result of human causes, and only
- 35 percent said models can accurately predict future climate
conditions.
Only 27 percent believed “the current state of scientific knowledge is
able to provide reasonable predictions of climate variability on time
scales of 100 years.”
That’s a long ways from “consensus.” It’s actually pretty close to what
the American public told pollsters for the Pew Trust in 2006:
- 70 percent thought global warming is happening,
- only 41 percent thought it was due to human causes,
- and only 19 percent thought it was a high-priority issue.
The alarmists think it’s a “paradox” that the more people learn about
climate change, the less likely they are to consider it a serious problem.
But as John Tierney with The New York Times points out in a blog
posted just a day ago, maybe, just maybe, it’s because people are smart
rather than stupid.
And incidentally, 70 percent of the public oppose raising gasoline
prices by $1 to fight global warming, and 80 percent oppose a $2/gallon
tax increase, according to a 2007 poll by The New York Times and
CBS News.
I’ve got news for them: Reducing emissions by 60 to 80 percent, which
is what the alarmists claim is necessary to “stop global warming,” would
cost a lot more than $1 a gallon.
Al Gore, the United Nations, environmental groups, and too often the
reporters who cover the climate change debate are the ones who are out of
step with the real “consensus.” They claim to be certain that global
warming is occurring, convinced it is due to human causes, and 100 percent
confident we can predict future climates.
Who’s on the fringe of scientific consensus? The alarmists, or the
skeptics?
These questions go to the heart of the issue: Is global warming a
crisis, as we are so often told by media, politicians, and environmental
activists? Or is it moderate, mostly natural, and unstoppable, as we are
told by many distinguished scientists?
Former Vice President Al Gore has said repeatedly that there is a
“consensus” in favor of his alarmist views on global warming. And of
course, he’s not alone.
Two weeks ago, Jim Martin, executive director of the Colorado
Department of Public Health and Environment, when told of our conference,
said, “You could have a convention of all the scientists who dispute
climate change in a relatively small phone booth.” (Denver Post,
February 12, 2008).
RealClimate.org predicted that no real scientists would show up at this
conference.
Well ...
We have with us, tonight and tomorrow, more than 200 scientists and
other experts on climate change, from Australia, Canada, England, France,
Hungary, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Sweden, and of course the United
States.
They come from the University of Alabama, Arizona State, Carleton,
Central Queensland, Delaware, Durham, and Florida State University.
From George Mason, Harvard, The Institute Pasteur in Paris, James Cook,
John Moores, Johns Hopkins, and the London School of Economics.
From The University of Mississippi, Monash, Nottingham, Ohio State,
Oregon State, Oslo, Ottawa, Rochester, Rockefeller, and the Royal
Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
And from the Russian Academy of Sciences, Suffolk University, the
University of Virginia, Westminster School of Business (in London), and
the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
And I apologize if I left anyone out.
These scientists and economists have been published thousands of times
in the world’s leading scientific journals and have written hundreds of
books. If you call this the fringe, where’s the center?
Hey Jim Martin, does this look like a phone booth to you?
Hey RealClimate, can you hear us now?
These scientists and economists deserve to be heard. They have stood up
to political correctness and defended the scientific method at a time when
doing so threatens their research grants, tenure, and ability to get
published. Some of them have even faced death threats for daring to speak
out against what can only be called the mass delusion of our time.
And they must be heard, because the stakes are enormous.
George Will, in an October Newsweek column commenting on Al
Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize, wrote that if nations impose the reductions in
energy use that Al Gore and the folks at RealClimate call for, they will
cause “more preventable death and suffering than was caused in the last
century by Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot combined.”
It takes more than four Norwegian socialists to win a Pulitzer Prize,
so I’ll put George Will’s Pulitzer Prize and his recent Bradley Prize up
against Gore’s Nobel any day.
You’ve probably read some of the attacks that have appeared in the
blogosphere and in print directed against this conference, and against The
Heartland Institute. Let me repeat for the record here tonight what
appears prominently on our Web site:
- No corporate dollars were used to help finance this conference.
- The Heartland Institute has 2,700 donors, and gets about 16 percent
of its income from corporations.
- Heartland gets less than 5 percent of its income from all
energy-producing companies combined. We are 95 percent carbon free.
And let me further add to the record:
- The honoraria paid to all of the speakers appearing at this
conference add up to less than the honorarium Al Gore gets paid for
making a single speech, and less than what his company makes selling
fake carbon “off-sets” in a week.
- It is no crime for a think tank or advocacy group to accept
corporate funding. In fact, corporations that fail to step forward and
assure that sensible voices are heard in this debate are doing their
shareholders, and their countries, a grave disservice.
We’re not doing this for the money, obviously. The Heartland Institute is
in the “skeptics” camp because we know alarmism is a tool that has been
used by opponents of individual freedom and free enterprise since as early
as 1798, when Thomas Malthus predicted that food supply would fail to keep
up with population growth.
We opposed global warming alarmism before we received any contributions
from energy corporations and we’ll continue to address it after many of
them have found ways to make a fast buck off the public hysteria.
We know which organizations are raking in millions of dollars a year in
government and foundation grants to spread fear and false information
about climate change. It’s not The Heartland Institute, and it’s not any
of the 50-plus cosponsoring organizations that helped make this conference
possible.
The alarmists in the global warming debate have had their say--over and
over again, in every newspaper in the country practically every day and in
countless news reports and documentary films. They have dominated the
media’s coverage of this issue. They have swayed the views of many people.
Some of them have even grown very rich in the process, and others still
hope to.
But they have lost the debate.
Winners don’t exaggerate. Winners don’t lie. Winners don’t appeal to
fear or resort to ad hominem attacks.
As George Will also wrote, “people only insist that a debate stop when
they are afraid of what might be learned if it continues.”
We invited Al Gore to speak to us tonight, and even agreed to pay his
$200,000 honorarium. He refused. We invited some of the well-known
scientists associated with the alarmist camp, and they refused.
All we got are a few professional hecklers registered from Lyndon
LaRouche, DeSmogBlog, and some other left-wing conspiracy groups. If you
run into them over the course of the next two days, please be kind to them
... and call security if they aren’t kind to you.
Skeptics are the winners of EVERY scientific debate, always,
everywhere. Because skepticism, as T.H. Huxley said, is the highest
calling of a true scientist.
No scientific theory is true because a majority of scientists say it to
be true. Scientific theories are only provisionally true until they are
falsified by data that can be better explained by a different theory. And
it is by falsifying current theories that scientific knowledge advances,
not by consensus.
The claim that global warming is a “crisis” is itself a theory. It can
be falsified by scientific fact, just as the claim that there is a
“consensus” that global warming is man-made and will be a catastrophe has
been dis-proven by the fact that this conference is taking place.
Which reminds me ... the true believers at RealClimate are now praising
an article posted on salon.com by Joseph Romm--a guy who sells solar
panels for a living, by the way--saying “‘consensus’? We never claimed
there was a ‘consensus’!”
And notorious alarmist John Holdren a couple weeks ago said “‘global
warming’? We never meant ‘global warming.’ We meant “‘global climate
disruption’!”
I’d say this was a sign of victory, but that would suggest their words
and opinions matter. It’s too late to move the goal posts, guys. You’ve
already lost.
It is my hope, and the reason The Heartland Institute organized this
conference, that public policies that impose enormous costs on millions of
people, in the U.S. and also around the world, will not be passed into law
before the fake “consensus” on global warming collapses.
Once passed, taxes and regulations are often hard to repeal. Once lost,
freedoms are often very difficult to retrieve.