A roll call of skeptics familiar to reporters on the climate beat — Pat Michaels, Willie Soon, Fred Singer, Bob Balling, Craig Idso, Bennie Peiser — and many more perhaps not so familiar are at the Marriott on Times Square today and tomorrow. There they’ll compare notes on why “global warming” is unimportant, not mankind’s fault, probably good for us if it is underway, a fiction cooked up by anti-capitalist zealots and enviro loons, or combinations of the above. A few reporters are paying attention to the meeting, sponsored by the libertarian-minded Heartland Institute in Chicago.

The meeting’s organizers do have some contemporary meteorology to celebrate – as Andrew C. Revkin noted Sunday in the New York Times – a hard winter freeze on the Arctic Ocean, blizzards in China, a plunge in global temperature in recent months, and even heavy snow in New England and parts of New York State the last few days that don’t quite hew to the popular script for global warming. Revkin runs some plots of temperature for context and talks to a few mainstream scientists too who naturally say winter it still winter, weather remains irregular, and it can still get cold. He has more to report on his Dot Earth blog, including mention of a recent article by a greenhouse skeptic, Lorne Gunter at Canada’s National Post recently.

The tone of Revkin’s piece is measured and calm – while still couching the meeting as more politics than science. More frontal in his opinion is Steve Connor at the Independent in the UK. His story this morning runs under the hed, “Tobacco and oil pay for climate conference,” and the lede lays it at the feet of a “right-wing think tank.” Both statements are true enough, for oil and tobacco are among the institute’s benefactors. But that’s about all that Connor has to say in his brief piece.

A few other pieces show up in the last few days. The Wilmington News Journal’s Jeff Montgomery and Molly Murray on Saturday reported it with a distinct local twist: among speakers is Delaware’s state climatologist, a skeptic on human climate disruption – a man getting a distinctly cold shoulder from the state’s governor with her policies to ease the state’s carbon emissions.

Bloggers, one can assume, will be paying this a great deal more attention than will many reporters from the traditional news media. The meeting, being open, has naturally been infiltrated. A look via technorati finds a man from DeSmogBlog is there to pooh pooh the participants, while a post by a Wall Street Journal man at its Environmental Capital blog is more respectful of the meeting’s import.

Grist for the Mill: Heartland Institute 2008 Int’l Conference on Climate Change ;

Pic: China Daily – crippling snow in south China.

-CP

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.