Mar 09 2009
Czech president joins meeting of climate change skeptics
Last night, Czech President Vaclav Klaus delivered a keynote address at a conference aimed at bringing about about a real debate on global warming. Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, the three day conference is entitled, “Global Warming:Was It Ever Really A Crisis?”
The mainstream media has all but ignored the entire conference, but those that did report, namely The Guardian, immediatly skewed their pieces to defame anyone in attendance. The first line in The Guardian’s story reads:
It is billed as the largest ever gathering of climate change deniers, a convention that kicked off last night with a title suggesting global warming is a thing of the past…
First, it has only been billed as the largest gathering of climate change deniers by the mainstream media. The actual billing straight from the Heartland Institute’s site reads:
The change from skeptics to deniers is a huge change, with a much more negative slant to it, evoking those other famous deniers - holocaust deniers. Think this is absurd?
In 2007, Ellen Goodman of The Boston Globe wrote an op-ed, stating:
I would like to say we’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.
Gore has repeatedly used the term “climate change deniers,” which immediately casts anyone questioning the man-made global warming line in a highly suspicious light with the holocaust deniers. Even if that is too much of a stretch, it simply isn’t accurate anyway.
No one offering intelligent dissent denies that the climate is changing - the climate is always changing. It always has and always will. In the past the Earth has been much hotter than it is now, and much colder. They do not deny that there have been periods of global warming throughout the Earth’s history, but they are highly skeptical of human’s ability to impact that change.
Later on in the Guardian piece, author Suzanne Goldberg writes:
Environmentalists argue that climate change denial, although the view of a minority, has damaged efforts to introduce policies to address the changes.
The terminology here is incredibly important here. Anyone who does deny climate change is happening is wrong. Absolutely 100% wrong. Again, there has always been climate change and always will be. These subtle ways are how the dissenters are denounced so that they don’t have to actually be debated.
On his blog report from the conference, Tom Nelson nicely sums up the speakers:
The event demonstrates once again the breadth and high quality of support that the “skeptical” perspective on climate change enjoys. About 80 speakers representing Brazil, Canada, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, England, Sweden, Israel, the United States, and more are on the schedule, with US speaker affiliations including Wharton, MIT, George Mason, NOAA, NASA, and US Dept of Energy. The roster of speakers has hundreds of peer-reviewed papers to its credit, with listed credentials including physicist, astrophysicist, astronaut, state climatologist, meteorologist, geologist, climate modeler, carbon accountant, economist, politician, hydrologist, environmentalist, paleoclimatologist, oceanographer, insects and infectious disease expert, Nobel prize-winning IPCC member, and founder of the Weather Channel.
What does The Guardian have to say about the credentials of those involved?
…a guest list that includes a hurricane forecaster, a retired astronaut and a sitting European president.
Yup, that’s all. It is much easier to denounce than debate.
Sources: The Guardian - Czech leader joins meeting of climate change deniers March 9, 2009
The Boston Globe - No change in political climate February 9, 2007
