The 2008 International Conference on Global Climate Change, sponsored by the Heartland Institute, has been going on in New York for the last couple of days. You can read about the conference here. A highlight of the conference is the release of the Summary for Policymakers of a report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). The document is, among other things, a rebuttal of the reports released by the United Nation's heavily politicized Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. You can access the NIPCC report here.

From the NIPCC report's introduction by Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences:

The IPCC is pre-programmed to produce reports to support the hypotheses of anthropogenic warming and the control of greenhouse gases, as envisioned in the Global Climate Treaty. The 1990 IPCC Summary completely ignored satellite data, since they showed no warming. The 1995 IPCC report was notorious for the significant alterations made to the text after it was approved by the scientists – in order to convey the impression of a human influence. The 2001 IPCC report claimed the twentieth century showed ‘unusual warming’ based on the now-discredited hockey-stick graph. The latest IPCC report, published in 2007, completely devaluates the climate contributions from changes in solar activity, which are likely to dominate any human influence.

The report is full of data and addresses such questions as, How much of modern warming is anthropogenic? How much is due to natural causes? How reliable are climate models? How much do we know about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Why is sea level rising? Will the economic effects of continued warming be positive or negative? The science is up to the minute--unlike the UN's report, which deliberately disregarded the most recent studies and data. It's an excellent place to learn the basics of the global warming controversy.

Here is just one chart from the NIPCC report:

Is the current warming mostly human-caused, or is it mainly a continuation of the natural recovery from the Little Ice Age? Your children's economic future may depend on how carefully policy-makers study that question.

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Posted by John at 12:19 PM  |    |