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March 2 - March 4, 2008
Marriott New York Marquis Times Square Hotel
1535 Broadway
New York City, NY U.S.A.

The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change is the first major international conference to focus on issues and questions not answered by advocates of the theory of man-made global warming.

Hundreds of scientists, economists, and public policy experts from around the world will gather on March 2-4, 2008, at the Marriott New York Marquis Hotel on Manhattan’s Time Square, to call attention to widespread dissent in the scientific community to the alleged “consensus” that the modern warming is primarily man-made and is a crisis.

Global Warming: Crisis or Scam?
The debate over whether human activity is responsible for some or all of the modern warming, and then what to do if our presence on Earth is indeed affecting the global climate, has enormous consequences for everyone in virtually all parts of the globe. Proposals to drive down human greenhouse gas emissions by raising energy costs or imposing draconian caps could dramatically affect the quality of life of people in developed countries, and, due to globalization, the lives of people in less-developed countries too.

The global warming debate that the public and policymakers usually see is one-sided, dominated by government scientists and government organizations agenda-driven to find data that suggest a human impact on climate and to call for immediate government action, if only to fund their own continued research, but often to achieve political agendas entirely unrelated to the science of climate change. There is another side, but in recent years it has been denied a platform from which to speak.

The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change promises to be an exciting event and the point of departure for future conferences, publications, and educational campaigns to present both sides of this important topic. Learn more...

In previous speeches, Michael criticized environmental groups for failing to incorporate complexity theory. Here he explains in detail why complexity theory is essential to environmental management, using the history of Yellowstone Park as an example of what not to do.

You can also watch a video of the speech (use the link below).

About the author:

Michael Crichton is the best-selling author of State of Fear, which takes the reader from the glaciers of Iceland to the volcanoes of Antarctica, from the Arizona desert to the deadly jungles of the Solomon Islands, from the streets of Paris to the beaches of Los Angeles. The novel races forward on a roller-coaster thrill ride, all the while keeping the brain in high gear. Gripping and thought provoking, State of Fear is Michael Crichton at his very best.

With each passing day, those who believe in man-made global warming are demonstrated to be more and more pathological in their obsession with a non-existent problem. So megalomaniacal have they become that no amount of evidence will get them to put their egos aside and, if nothing else, approach the issue with some semblance of humility. Of course, when one's goal is totalitarianism, one cannot be humble – the two are fundamentally incompatible mindsets.

A simple bit of logic would be enough to defuse this silly fraud once and for all, were the true believers not so impervious to reason. Earth was once warm enough to support dinosaurs, and once cold enough that only heavily furred mammals like mastodons could survive. In neither era was humanity even in existence. So how did those changes in planetary climate occur? Obviously, the Earth is perfectly capable of warming and cooling all by itself.

We also know that smaller scale changes have occurred just within the last few centuries. Why do you think the Vikings named a far northern island to which they sailed “Greenland”? Hint: It wasn't because the land was covered with white polar icecap. How did Greenland get green in the absence of modern human industry?  This was then followed by the “Little Ice Age,” running from roughly the mid-16^th to the mid-19^th centuries.

The year of 1816 was known as “The Year Without A Summer,” when snowstorms hit northeastern North America in June and frost killed crops in Europe. The commonly accepted explanation for this is the eruption of the Mt. Tambora volcano in what is now Indonesia.  The vast quantities of ash and dust thrown into the atmosphere helped to block out the sun's warmth, resulting in an unusually cold year until it finally settled out. Read the rest...

Results of an international survey of climate scientists

This booklet summarizes the results of international surveys of climate scientists conducted in 1996 and 2003 by two German environmental scientists, Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch. Bray is a research scientist at the GKSS Institute of Coastal Research in Geesthacht, Germany. Von Storch is a climatology professor at the University of Hamburg and director of the Institute of Coastal Research.

More than 530 climate scientists from 27 different countries provided numerical answers each time the survey was conducted. All responses were anonymous. The same questions were asked each time the survey was conducted, plus an additional 32 questions were asked in 2003. The 2003 survey was conducted online. Notice of the survey was posted in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society and on the Climlist server (Climlist is a moderated international electronic mail distribution list for climatologists and those working in closely related fields). Notices also were sent to institutional lists in Germany, Denmark, and the U.K. The survey was password protected to ensure that scientists in climate-related fields were the only ones with access to it.

The surveys presented dozens of assertions regarding climate change and asked respondents to give a numerical score, on a scale of 1 to 7, indicating the extent to which the respondents agreed or disagreed with each assertion. The entire results of both surveys can be found online at a site created and maintained by Bray and von Storch.1 The average responses to every question in both the 1996 and 2003 surveys are reported in the appendix of this booklet. This is all valuable and accurate data, of course, but it can be difficult for a layperson to interpret. What does it mean, for example, to say the average response to a question is 3.39?

To make the survey results more transparent, we singled out 18 questions from the 2003 survey and present the answers here in a simplified and less academic style. For each question, we combined the percentages of those respondents who gave numeric scores of 1, 2, or 3 and called this “agree.”

Helheim Glacier in southeast Greenland, pictured in 2005, is one of the two glaciers
that have slowed down in their flow to the sea. (Photo: NASA)

Greenland isn’t melting as fast as we feared.

It was big news when the rate of melting suddenly doubled in 2004 as ice sheets began moving more quickly into the sea. That inspired predictions of the imminent demise of Greenland’s ice — and a catastrophic rise in sea level. But a paper published online this afternoon by Science reports that two of the largest glaciers have suddenly slowed, bringing the rate of melting last year down to near the previous rate. At one glacier, Kangerdlugssuaq, “average thinning over the glacier during the summer of 2006 declined to near zero, with some apparent thickening in areas on the main trunk.”

I asked the lead author of the paper, Ian Howat of the University of Washington, for some perspective. Here’s his take:

Over the past few years there has been a major revolution in the way scientists think about ice sheet response to climate change. Previously, it was assumed that the big ice sheets react very slowly to climate, on the order of centuries to millenia. This is because surface melting and precipitation was thought to be the dominant way in which ice sheets gain and lose mass under changes in climate. However, over the past five years we have observed that the flow speed of the ice sheets, and therefore the rate at which the ice flows to ocean can change dramatically over very short time scales.

By short, he means months or less. Read the rest...