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The Heartland Institute sponsored the 9th International Conference on Climate Change.

Rappers, Congressmen, Comedians Gather at Conference of Climate Change Skeptics

What do an Austrian rapper, an English comedian, a U.S. Congressman and 500 scientists have in common? For one, you could find them all at the 9th International Conference on Climate Change (#ICCC9). The event, sponsored by political think-tank The Heartland Institute, brought people from all over the world together to learn about the science of climate change at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, July 7-9 2014.

Austrian Rap artist Kilez More
Austrian rap artist Kilez More

The Heartland Institute was founded in 1984 with the mission of researching and promoting free-market solutions to the nation’s problems. It employes 29 full-time staff, includes over 200 academics who participate in its peer review process, and counts over 160 elected officials on its legislative advisory board.

The opening night ceremonies included keynotes by weather guru Joe Bastardi and California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, award, and a multi-lingual musical finale.

Heartland President and CEO Joseph Bast introduced Joe Bastardi, a consultant on weather prediction frequently seen on shows such as Fox News Live, The O’Reilly Factor, The Colbert Report, and CBS’s The Early Show. Bastardi took a humorous look at the global warming movement’s foibles, titling his presentation, with a tip of the hat to Jefferson Airplane, “When the Truth is Found to be Lies.”

He presented charts which he said showed serious contradictions and inconsistencies in the claims of “global warming alarmists,” concluding that people who claimed Elvis was still alive had more valid claims than the global warming crowd. He concluded with an appeal that people work on improving climate education, asking that the science showing that the sun, oceans and stochastic events, not CO2, influence climate be taught in the schools.

The second keynote was presented by Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who drew upon his many years in public service and a brief stint as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times to support his skepticism about claims of climate change alarmists.

In order to illustrate why it is difficult to get complicated scientific ideas explained clearly in mass media, Rohrabacher recalled an incident when his editor at the LA Times sent him to cover a presentation by a group of oceanographers who were to explain the impact an oil spill had on the California coast line. As he entered the offices where the presentation was scheduled, he saw a young woman holding a rubber duck, covered with oil, yelling, “Murderers, murderers!”

Congressman Dana Rohrabacher
Congressman Dana Rohrabacher

When he asked her why, she said that she had been hitchhiking into LA that morning and a man picked her up and promised her a place to stay if she would stand here, hold the duck, and yell.

Despite the spurious nature of the “demonstration,” Rohrabacher said, it was the image of the girl and oil-covered duck that made the front pages and TV news, not the scientific presentation.

Rohrabacher then recounted a long list of pseudo-science scares which had created brief tempests, including alar on apples, acid rain, cyclamate sweetener, the cranberry scare of the mid-fifties, the new ice age, Three Mile Island, freon in spray cans and the ozone hole. What all of these had in common, he said, was that they scared people, caused government to waste money, create more regulations, and take actions which usually lined someone’s pockets. He pointed out just how rich global warming had made Al Gore.

Rohrabacher concluded with an appeal to those at the conference to not lose hope and continue the battle to get the truth about climate change better known. “Hold firm to the truth,” he said, “and the American people will rush to us and we will win this battle.”

The evening ended up with performances by English comedian James Delingpole, who is also the editor of the London branch of breitbart.com, and Austrian rap artist Kilez More. After performing his climate change rap, with subtitles on the video, More spoke about the importance of reaching out to young people through the culture. “When they realize that money is being spent on preventing a theoretical global warming a hundred years from now that could be helping people today, they pay attention.” More concluded, “History has shown us when everyone has the same opinion, its time to take a second look.”

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About Leo Sopicki

Writer, photographer, graphic artist and technologist. I focus my creative efforts on celebrating the American virtues of self-reliance, individual initiative, volunteerism, tolerance and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.

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8 comments

  1. Let us pray;

    ALGORE is my shepherd; I shall not think.

    He maketh me lie down in his Greenzi pastures:

    He leadeth me beside his still-freezing waters.

    (Spoken; Adagio); He selleth my soul for CO2.

    He leadeth me in his path of his self-righteousness for his
    own sake.

    And yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of
    reason,

    I shall fear all logic for thou art with me (Spoken; Adagio);
    and thinking for me.

    Thy Gore family oil fortune and thy 10,000 square ft. Gore
    mansion, they comfort me.

    Thou preparest a movie in the presence of contradictory
    evidence.

    Thou anointest mine head with nonsense, (Spoken; Adagio) ;
    my mindless conformity runneth over.

    Surely blind faith and hysteria shall follow me all the days
    of the rest of my life,

    And I shall dwell in the house of ALGORE (Spoken; Adagio) ;
    forever.

    • What does Al Gore have to do with the effect of CO₂ on planetary temperature?

    • I really don’t get this and so many other Al Gore “objections” or supposed “refutations”. As CB says below, how is HE the issue in any significant way? I’ve never seen his documentary or read anything by him on this subject other than a sentence or two quoted in the media… He’s had nothing to do with my acceptance of the near-complete consensus, only slowly derived, by relevant scientists re. the human input to undeniable global warming. I’d guess the same is true for probably a majority of those who accept the scientific consensus. And I doubt there is a single climate scientist who even consulted his material in any significant way, although some may be familiar with it or supportive of it.

  2. For the worst crisis imaginable it’s still ONLY 32 years of nothing beyond 95% certainty from science so what’s to believe? Do we “believe” science or a mob of you determined, goose stepping, neocon hissy-fit hating “believers”? Exaggerating a “could be” crisis was your Iraq War. Nice work girls. False concern and exaggeration are still fear mongering and lying in the history books.

    • What kind of crisis are you imagining?

      If we haven’t set the world on a course toward total polar meltdown, 75 meters of sea level rise, the drowning of the homes of billions of people, and untold climate chaos just with the CO₂ we’ve already emitted, why isn’t there a single previous example in Earth’s history of polar ice caps withstanding CO₂ so high?

  3. “Ask the majority of climate scientists: Carbon pollution from dirty energy is the main cause of global warming.” http://clmtr.lt/c/JEK0cd0cMJ

  4. “Rohrabacher then recounted a long list of pseudo-science scares which had created brief tempests, including alar on apples, acid rain, cyclamate sweetener, the cranberry scare of the mid-fifties, the new ice age, Three Mile Island, freon in spray cans and the ozone hole. What all of these had in common, he said, was that they scared people, caused government to waste money, create more regulations, and take actions which usually lined someone’s pockets.”

    Did he happen to mention whose pockets they’d lined? And isn’t Rohrabacher a staunch supporter of capitalism, whose very operating mechanism requires that somebody’s pockets get lined in every transaction? Why is this suddenly a bad thing when it involves something he doesn’t like? He couldn’t be trying to “scare people”, could he?

    Acid rain, freon in spray cans and the ozone hole (the last two being related) have all been successfully alleviated through government action to reduce the emissions that were causing them. The new ice age was a sensational story propagated by Newsweek and other media outlets in the 1970s, not by scientists or even politicians. Even in the 1970s, most climate papers predicted warming, not cooling. Three Mile Island was a real nuclear accident whose possible consequences were exaggerated, again largely by the media. I’ve never heard of any of the others.

  5. “Rohrabacher then recounted a long list of pseudo-science scares which
    had created brief tempests, including alar on apples, acid rain,
    cyclamate sweetener, the cranberry scare of the mid-fifties, the new ice
    age, Three Mile Island, freon in spray cans and the ozone hole.”

    Throwing out a bunch of completely unrelated incidents is not an argument. Acid rain and the ozone hole were not pseudo science scares at all . . .they were and are major problems that have been mitigated by , , ,yep . . .. government regulation.

    And when were a majority of scientists embellishing Three Mile island or cyclamate sweeteners? Any exaggerations of dangers there came from the news media that Dana was a part of.