On Sunday, March 2, reporter Rich Schapiro of the New York Daily News profiled J. Scott Armstrong, Ph.D., a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and speaker at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, being held today and tomorrow at the Marriott Marquis Hotel on Times Square in New York City.
Armstrong participated in this morning’s panel on Climate Change Impacts but remains available for interviews. For more information, contact Heartland Media Relations Manager Harriette Johnson at 312/515-0559.
Penn prof still hot to tackle Al Gore on global warming
by Rich Schapiro
Daily News staff writer
Sunday, March 2nd 2008, 4:00 AM
The University of Pennsylvania marketing professor who has publicly challenged Al Gore to a $10,000 bet over global warming is coming to New York — and he still wants a showdown with the former vice president.
Scott Armstrong will be in town for a climate change conference that he hopes will sway public opinion away from Gore’s well-known views on the perils of global warming.
“He claims to be interested in science,” Armstrong, an expert on mathematical forecasting at the Wharton School, told the Daily News. “It would be a good place for him to go.”
Armstrong first engaged Gore last June when he challenged the star of “An Inconvenient Truth” to a wager to see who could more accurately predict the Earth’s temperature over the next 10 years.
Gore replied promptly and courteously, but he told the scholar he was too busy, Armstrong says.
Armstrong disputes the central premise of Gore’s Academy Award-winning documentary: that the Earth is warming at a calamitous rate and humans are to blame. Armstrong believes the warming trends are the result of a natural cycle and suggests that the increase in carbon levels found in the atmosphere may be a consequence of warming — not a cause.
He will be presenting those ideas at the conservative Heartland Institute-sponsored International Conference on Climate Change, which will be held at the Marriott Marquis Times Square Hotel through Tuesday.
A spokesman for Gore did not respond to a request for comment.
Diane Carol Bast is a former member of The Heartland Institute’s board of directors.
