Upcoming Conference Will Challenge Media’s One-Sided Climate Agenda
Although the liberal media rarely acknowledge it, there is a perspective on climate change that isn’t their “the sky is falling” view.
Scientists, researchers and climate experts whose views are often ignored by the media will gather to share their views at the ninth International Conference on Climate Change in Las Vegas, Nev., from July 7-9. The conference is being put on by The Heartland Institute, an co-sponsored by a number of groups including the Media Research Center as a co-sponsor.
This conference will bring together some of the climate scientists from around the world, some from as far away as Australia, Sweden, Germany and Russia to challenge the widespread claims about man-made global warming.
The Heartland Institute is a leading proponent of skepticism over climate change, publishing three editions of “Climate Change Reconsidered.” They call it a collection of peer-reviewed scientific studies about global warming that provides an “independent ‘second opinion,’” on the issue.
Notable conference speakers will include numerous university professors and researchers, such as William Gray, a pioneer hurricane forecaster, Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and even Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace.
The Heartland Institute has hosted eight previous conferences since 2008, describing them as “events that attracted extensive international attention to the debate taking place in the scientific community over the causes, extent, and consequences of climate change.”
This year’s conference will include panel discussions focused on the science behind global warming, such as how the sun affects the climate and how the climate affects oceans. Attendees will also discuss politics in panels on the cost of a carbon tax and the funding of the alarmist movement.
The conference is unlikely to get much coverage from the liberal media which promoted climate alarmism, hyped UN’s climate panel (IPCC) reports, ignored skeptical scientists and connected climate change to numerous extreme weather events for years.
When the IPCC released the first segment of its Fifth Assessment Report on Sept. 27, 2013, the networks gushed over its findings while ignoring dissenting opinions. That same night CBS’ “Evening News” correspondent Ben Tracy even warned that oceans had warmed so much that “had all that heat gone into the atmosphere, air temperatures could have risen by more than 200 degrees.” Spencer called Tracy’s claim a “meaningless statistic.”
Similarly, when the IPCC released more of the report on March 31, 2014, the networks hyped the results yet again. NBC host Brian Williams began that evening’s “Nightly News” warning of the “clear and present danger [climate change] represents.”
ABC correspondent Jim Avila joined the hysteria and declared on March 31 “World News” that “there is no more debate. Global warming is real, here now, wreaking havoc worldwide and is caused by humans.”
Not surprisingly, the media rarely included the many scientists with other views about climate change, such as those attending Heartland’s conference. As of March 2014 both ABC and CBS had ignored skeptical scientists for almost four years. When the networks did interview skeptical scientists, such as Spencer, journalists ridiculed or attacked them.
Finally, the networks have aggressively pushed the claim that climate change causes extreme weather events in spite of scientists who said there isn’t enough evidence for that claim. Between March 2014 and June 2014, ABC, CBS and NBC blamed climate change on increased droughts and forest fires, ignoring evidence that those events had declined. The networks also falsely spread fear over the supposed increase in hurricanes throughout 2014 and often connected Superstorm Sandy to climate change in a year after the storm.
— Sean Long is Staff Writer at the Media Research Center. Follow Sean Long on Twitter.
