PRESS RELEASE: Heartland Institute Experts React to Latest Alarmist Government Climate Report

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, IL (November 24, 2018) – The U.S. Global Change Research Program on Friday released its fourth national climate assessment as required by Congress. The federal office’s report, once again, blamed human activity for bringing about catastrophic global warming. It predicted a grim and costly future unless the world essentially stops using fossil fuels immediately.

The following statements from environment and energy experts at The Heartland Institute may be used for attribution. For more comments or to schedule an interview, please contact Director of Communications Jim Lakely at [email protected] or call/text 312-731-9364.

NOTE: The Heartland Institute will be attending COP24 in Katowice, Poland as an NGO-observer and will be hosting a half-day climate conference featuring scientists and policy experts skeptical of catastrophic, human-caused global warming. For more information on Heartland’s COP24 agenda, click here.

  

“This latest climate report is just more of the same – except for even greater exaggeration, worse science, and added interference in the political process by unelected, self-serving bureaucrats.

“With a new volume out in December, The Heartland Institute has published 4,000 pages of the Climate Change Reconsidered series by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). Those reports cite many hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers that show how every conclusion of this latest government report are false.

“This report from the climate alarmist Deep State in our government is even more hysterical than some United Nations reports. The idea that global temperatures could rise as much as 12 degrees in the next 80 years is absurd and not a shred of actual data and observation supports that. And as noted in Climate Change Reconsidered, sea levels have not been rising at an accelerated rate, and global temperatures have stayed largely the same for much of the last 20 years.

“President Trump was required by law to release this report, but he is not required to take it seriously – and he surely will not. To do so would undermine his sensible, deregulatory agenda and restart the war on fossil fuels.”

Tim Huelskamp, Ph.D.
President & CEO
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]

 

“I have never seen such blatantly absurd conclusions drawn entirely from mathematical models that use only a limited number of variables. Of course, this shoddy science by Obama-era appointees serves its real purpose: producing a preordained political outcome that puts more power and money in the hands of the United Nations.

 “The physical evidence proves conclusively that sea level is not rising at increased levels. The frequency and strength of hurricanes has been declining for years, not increasing. The same goes for tornados, floods, and forest fires. In fact, there is no evidence that further increases in carbon dioxide emissions will have any deleterious effect on the planet or its temperature.

“This report is a scientific embarrassment. Not only does it rely on computer models to predict the climate through the end of the century, it relies on computer models from five years ago that have been laughably wrong, failing to get even close to reality since 2013. Happily, President Trump has on his advisory staff Dr. William Happer, who knows how flawed these models are and will advise the president to not base a single aspect of U.S. policy upon them.” 

Jay Lehr, Ph.D.
Science Director
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]

Dr. Lehr and 18 distinguished scientists wrote a 54-page critique of the Global Change Research Program’s 2017 report, which was similarly alarimst. You can read that critique here.

 

“This is the Deep State run amok. The Trump administration needs to root out the embedded leftists who are responsible for this one-sided propaganda report that is even less credible than Al Gore. The left has already politicized the science, and President Trump has every right to populate the executive branch agencies that produced this report with climate realists.”

James Taylor
Senior Fellow, Environment and Energy Policy
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]

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