It’s not often a book receives an ovation at a business conference, but an 880-page, 1-1/2 inch-thick, four-and-a-half-pound rebuttal of global warming alarmism earned that distinction June 2 at the Third International Conference on Climate Change.
The book, released during the one-day conference attended by more than 250 scientists, economists, policymakers, and media, is Climate Change Reconsidered, the 2009 report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).
Vital Weapon in Debate
Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute, which published the book, said the NIPCC report fills a gaping hole in the arsenal global warming skeptics need to counter the United Nations’ bible of global warming alarmism, the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The science underlying the U.N. report is dissected, rebutted, and refuted in Climate Change Reconsidered, coauthored by Dr. S. Fred Singer and Dr. Craig Idso. The two scientists wrote nine chapters and cited thousands of peer-reviewed research papers and books ignored by the U.N. or published after the U.N. report’s release.
Bast, the book’s editor, reviewed the history of skeptics’ literature for conference attendees and said the NIPCC report signaled “a new chapter in the debate over global warming.”
As he held up a copy of the report, the audience broke into applause.
Coauthor Idso, a geographer and founder, now chairman, of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, said the conclusions in the U.N. report “far outstrip or even contradict the implications of a vast array of real-world data.”
Negligible Human Impact
Singer, who for decades has been in the vanguard of skeptical opposition to alarmist junk science, said the NIPCC report made three broad points.
First, Singer noted, there is no evidence the rise in global temperatures in the past 50 years was due primarily to human activity. There is no strong evidence, he said, that human activity has had any meaningful influence on climate at all.
Second, Singer observed, increases in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are unrelated to temperature trends, and efforts to mitigate them are “ineffectual” and “won’t have the slightest impact on CO2 concentrations.”
Third, Singer pointed out, the debate about global warming “is not about the science.” To great applause, he said the political effort to regulate CO2 emissions “is about money and power.”
Dan Miller ([email protected]) is executive vice president and publisher for The Heartland Institute.
For more information …
Climate Change Reconsidered, written by Craig Idso and S. Fred Singer and peer-reviewed by more than 30 scientists, sells for $154 and is available through The Heartland Institute. To order, call 312-377-4000 or visit http://www.heartland.org or http://www.amazon.com. The full text in PDF format can be downloaded free of charge at http://www.nipccreport.org.
