Three diverse keynote speakers highlighted The Heartland Institute’s 13th International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, DC.

In addition, four prominent longtime proponents of climate realism were presented with awards at the conference held at the Trump International Hotel on July 25.

Solidarity Against Climate Authoritarianism

The breakfast keynote was delivered via video by Dominik Kolorz, chairman of the board of the Śląsko-Dąbrowski Region of Polish Solidarity, the labor union which famously led a civil resistance movement against the Soviet Union and its Polish puppet government in the 1980s.

Kolorz said the climate policies of the European Union are dangerous to Europe generally and Poland specifically.

“Since 2005, [Solidarity] has been actively involved in the process of assessing climate policy,” said Kolorz. “We are the first institution in Poland which began to pay attention to the fact that the climate policy which suggests that carbon dioxide emissions, that man [is] responsible for global warming, will have huge social and economic consequences. … The climate goals of the European Union, associated with the [United Nations’] climate goals, make us increasingly likely to be in a social and economic crisis.

“Just like The Heartland Institute, we do not deny that we live in a time where the temperature on Earth is different, higher … than what has occurred over the recent periods,” Kolorz said. “We do not deny that we are in a period of global warming, but since there is no real scientific consensus, in our opinion, about human responsibility for climate change, we cannot allow that in the disguise of climate change that poorer societies only bear the results of climate policies.”

Climate Truth Award

Harley Moody, chairman of the board of The Heartland Institute, which publishes Environment & Climate News, presented the Dauntless Purveyor of Climate Truth Award to Jay Lehr, Ph.D., a senior policy analyst with the International Climate Science Coalition, who served as Heartland’s science director for 26 years.

“Science education has been my life’s work,” said Lehr. “From 1968 to 1971, myself and half a dozen other people worked to successfully convince [President] Richard Nixon to form an Environmental Protection Agency.

“For the last 30 years, I’ve been working to dismantle the EPA,” Lehr said.

Tackling Flawed Predictions, Policies

Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), ranking member of the Water, Ocean, and Wildlife Subcommittee in the U.S. House of Representatives, gave the lunch keynote presentation. McClintock said members of the radical environmental Left, such as his House colleague Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and even Charles, Prince of Wales, have been making “apocalyptic” predictions about climate change that always happen to be wrong.

“This [doomsday forecasting] would be amusing except it continues to drive public policy despite the failure of every one of their predictions and forecasts to coincide with the actual data that we’ve accumulated since this nonsense began,” McClintock told the audience.

During the Little Ice Age from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, superstitious locals would have exorcisms performed on the edges of advancing glaciers and would go on witch hunts “to punish those responsible for the famine and disease and suffering that this era of prolonged cold produced,” McClintock said.

“We laugh at the superstition and folly of those who blamed witchcraft for the severe climate change of the Little Ice Age, but I’m convinced future generations are going to be looking at ours in precisely the same way, except our generation won’t have the excuse of ignorance,” McClintock said. “With all of our knowledge and technology, we’ve allowed ourselves once again to be thrown into panic over forces that have been at work shaping our planet since it formed.”

Awarded for Defending Science

Three awards were presented at the dinner session. The Lifetime Achievement in Climate Science Award, from The Heartland Institute, was given to Dr. Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg and chief science advisor of the International Climate Science Coalition.

Dr. Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan emeritus professor of meteorology at MIT, was the recipient of the Frederick Seitz Memorial Award for Exceptional Courage in the Quest for Knowledge, from the Science and Environmental Policy Project. In his acceptance speech, Lindzen discussed the dozens of prominent scientists, including many who directed or worked in government agencies charged with climate monitoring, whose research undermining the claim humans are causing dangerous climate change has been ignored by journalists intent on pushing what Lindzen says is a false narrative of a scientific consensus on climate change.

The last award of the evening, Heartland’s Courage in Defense of Science Award, was presented to Patrick Michaels, Ph.D, longtime director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute and a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists.

Hurricanes: Fact vs. Fiction

ICCC 13 wrapped up with a rousing dinner keynote speech from Joe Bastardi, the longtime AccuWeather meteorologist who is now co-chief forecaster at WeatherBELL Analytics.

Bastardi described the media’s tendency to cover each new major hurricane making landfall in the United States as if anthropogenic climate change were responsible for it. Bastardi said the media ignores the fact more destructive, more powerful, and more deadly storms ravaged the country long before climate change became a scientific and public policy issue.

Timothy Benson (tbenson@heartland.org) is a policy analyst for The Heartland Institute.

INTERNET INFO

13th International Conference on Climate Change, The Heartland Institute, July 25, 2019: https://climateconference.heartland.org/