The crumbling case for global warming

Don't confuse me with the facts!

One young radical turned up at the Heartland Institute’s climate change skeptics’ conference in New York this week to declare that he had never witnessed so much hypocrisy. How, he asked the panelists of a session on European policy, could they sleep at night? Clearly puzzled, one of the panelists asked him with which parts of their presentations he disagreed. “Oh,” he said “I didn’t come here to listen to the presentations.”

The conference — titled “Global Warming: Was it ever really a crisis?” — attracted close to 700 participants. Most of those I met displayed almost joy at being among people who dared to stand up to the mindless climate “consensus” and the refusal to debate, or even look at, the facts, as typified by that righteous young radical.

President Obama is considering a cap-and-trade system with which Canada would be forced to co-ordinate its own policies. The conference made clear how damaging and pointless such a policy would be.

Vaclav Klaus, the professorial president of both the Czech Republic and the European Union, pointed out at the conference’s first session on Sunday evening that the global political establishment was still in the grip of thinking reminiscent of the Communism under which he once lived. He noted that few if any politicians seemed even aware of, or interested in, either the shortcomings of officially cooked climate science, or the potential disasters of climate policy.