EPA Must Revisit Finding:

Published April 21, 2010

The Obama administration’s effort to regulate carbon dioxide emissions has run into a scientific brick wall and should be re-examined, a leading climatologist will argue at the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change May 16-18 in Chicago.
 
Patrick Michaels, Ph.D., research professor of Environmental Sciences at University of Virginia for 30 years before joining the Cato Institute, says recent conclusions in global warming science should compel the Environmental Protection Agency to re-open its 2009 finding that carbon dioxide endangers human health.
 
If implemented, the endangerment finding could result in a tax on CO2 emissions from virtually every source – human, animal, and industrial – in the United States.
 
“The endangerment finding suffered from systematic errors that were inevitable, given that the way in which the EPA chose to determine the required background science had to result in both biased and outmoded climate science,” Dr. Michaels said. “In addition, the EPA made grand and sweeping assumptions about human adaptation to climate that are of such illogic as to invalidate the entire study.”
 
Michaels will join more than 70 other elite climate scientists, economists, and public policy experts at the three-day conference at the Marriott Hotel on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. The participants, who represent both sides of the global warming debate, will develop the theme “Reconsidering the science and economics.”
 
Panels and keynote presentations also will examine the threat of ocean acidification to marine life, projections about sea levels and rising global temperatures, green job creation, and the effect of the solar wind on Earth’s climate.
 
In addition, a panel of scientists and journalists will discuss the effect on the global warming debate stemming from the Climategate emails – thousands of leaked documents from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain. Those emails indicated systematic suppression and discrediting of climate skeptics’ views and the discarding of temperature data, which suggests a bias for making the case for man-made global warming.
 
The conference is produced by The Heartland Institute, a 26-year-old Chicago-based think tank that in 2008 and 2009 hosted three international conferences challenging the claim that a consensus exists among scientists that global warming has brought Earth to a crisis point and that human activity primarily is to blame.
 
Conference director James M. Taylor noted, “Our speakers don’t all agree on the causes, extent, or consequences of climate change or what, if anything, should be done. We invited these top scientists and economists to share their latest research and engage in respectful debate.”
 
Complimentary registration is available to qualified print, broadcast, and online journalists. For more information about the presenters, topics and agenda, contact Dan Miller or Tammy Nash at The Heartland Institute, [email protected] or [email protected]. Or go to www.heartland.org.
 
The nonprofit Heartland Institute is funded by 1,700 donors. No corporate donor provides more than 5 percent of its $7 million annual budget.