Climate Truths Defended in Conference Keynote Addresses

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Published July 3, 2015

Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint kicked off the Tenth International Conference on Climate Change on June 11 by presenting the 2015 Political Leadership on Climate Change Award to U.S. Senator James Inhofe (R-OK).

            DeMint, a former U.S. senator from South Carolina, said when introducing Inhofe, “It is vitally important we recognize leaders and public figures who have stood against the tide, unwilling to preach falsehoods to push an agenda of power [and are] willing to stand up against the really incredible intimidation that goes on for those who speak the truth.”

            Inhofe, chairman of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said of climate alarmism, “It’s all about money. I am not saying that—Tom Steyer is saying that.”

            Inhofe says billionaires and multimillionaires like Steyer and Jay Faison are using their money to influence candidates’ positions on climate change or to elect alarmist candidates in the upcoming election cycle.

            Discussing Faison, Inhofe said, “And it’s not that he is going to put $100 million into trying to resurrect the myth of global warming; he is putting $175 million in and he is going to concentrate on Republicans.

            “My concern is this,” Inhofe continued. “There are a lot of good people I disagree with in the U.S. Senate, but they are human beings too. [Jay Faison] is going to try to use [his $175 million] to try to influence [them]. And all it takes is one or two or three of the senators to say, ‘You know, maybe I should appease them.’ An appeaser is someone who feeds his friends to the alligators, hoping they will eat him last. … And those who cried, ‘appease, appease’ are hanged by those they tried to please.”

            Inhofe, who has endured vitriolic criticism for his defense of climate realism, said, “If you don’t have the truth on your side and you don’t have logic on your side, then you do two things: You insult [people] and you call [people] names.”

            Inhofe says climate alarmists use these strategies to divert attention from the weaknesses of the evidence supporting claims humans are causing catastrophic climate change. 

Steyn: Hockey Stick ‘Fraudulent’

Friday’s breakfast keynote was delivered by political commentator Mark Steyn.

            Steyn has been embroiled in a legal battle with climatologist Michael Mann since 2012, when Mann sued Steyn for defamation after he called Mann’s famous hockey stick graph depicting a sharp rise in temperatures during the 20th century “fraudulent.”

            Speaking to the crowd, Steyn said the hockey stick graph was indeed fraudulent “both in its construction and in the uses to which it’s been put by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and Al Gore and every schoolhouse and most governments throughout the Western world.”

            Steyn says governments across the globe ratified the Kyoto Protocol because of the hockey stick graphs. 

Calls Warming Beneficial

Citing past periods of warming and cooling, such as the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, Steyn says changes in temperature are nothing new.

            “I accept the planet has warmed and I rejoice that it has warmed because as with the Medieval Warm Period, it has been hugely beneficial to mankind,” he said, “For a generation of people across the Western world, Michael Mann abolished not only the Medieval Warm Period but the entire concept of natural climate variability.”

            Steyn says today’s young climate activists have been force-fed global warming science and “don’t know what natural climate variability is.”

            Steyn says climate science would have to reject the hockey stick model to restore its legitimacy and integrity.

            “Taking a wild ride on the hockey stick corrupted the heart of climate science, and to cleanse themselves they have to actually draw a clear line and admit the last 15 years were wrong, that it corrupted everything it touched, from the prestigious journal Nature to peer review to the governments that embraced it to the Climatic Research Unit which trashed its founder’s legacy,” Steyn said. “Climate science has to make a fresh start and get beyond this.”

  D. Brady Nelson ([email protected]) is a neo-Austrian economist, a writer from Brisbane, Australia and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and is a columnist with Townhall. Attorney Ann N. Purvis ([email protected]) writes from Dallas, Texas.