New Climate Change Report Applauded by Scientists, Economists, Policymakers

WASHINGTON, D.C. – It's not often a book receives an ovation at a business conference, but an 880-page, 1-1/2 inch-thick, six-pound rebuttal of global-warming alarmism earned that distinction Tuesday at the Third International Conference on Climate Change.

The book, released during the one-day conference attended more than 250 scientists, economists, policy makers, and media, is Climate Change Reconsidered, the 2009 report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).

Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute, which published the tome, said the NIPCC report fills a gaping hole in the arsenal that 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 that were 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 the attendees and said the NIPCC report signaled "a new chapter in the debate over global warming."

As he hoisted a copy of the report from under the podium and held it up, the audience broke into applause.

Co-author Idso, a geographer and founding president 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."

Singer, who for decades has been the vanguard of skeptic opposition to alarmist junk science, said the NIPCC report made three broad points:

• No evidence that the rise in global temperatures in the past 50 years is due to human activity. On the contrary, human activity has "no influence" at all on temperature change.

• Increases in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are natural, and any efforts to mitigate them are "ineffectual" and "won't have the slightest impact on CO2 concentrations."

• 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."

The Heartland Institute is a 25-year-old nonprofit research and education organization based in Chicago and devoted to discovering, developing, and promoting free-market solutions to social and economic problems.

• Climate Change Reconsidered by Craig Idso and S. Fred Singer

• ISBN-13 978-1-934791-28-8

• $154 paperback perfect bound

• To order, call 312-377-4000 or visit www.heartland.org or www.amazon.com

For more information, contact Dan Miller, dmiller@heartland.org or Tammy Nash, tnash@heartland.org; phone 312/377-4000.