Just a Little Global Warming

I attended the Minnesota Symposium on Climate Change on August 19th. Yeah, I know, climate change is old news—but wait. This event was a little—no actually—a lot different than what one may expect when they hear the title.

Attendees to the MN Symposium on Climate Change

Just check out a little flavor of this event’s rhetoric:

[During the past winter of 2008-09, 1,500 new record low temperatures were set, along with 700 snow records; 179 glaciers around the world are advancing at record rate. 30,000 scientists from all over the world have signed onto The Petition Project, stating there exists no convincing scientific evidence that the human release of carbon dioxide is causing disruption of the Earth’s climate.]

These are the concerns that brought together 14 scholars and experts and over 200 attendees to the Earle Brown Heritage Center in Brooklyn Park. Yes, this event gathered those interested in combating the current conventional wisdom that global warming is a problem and that it is man-made. The Minnesota Free Market Institute sponsored the event.

As global temperatures have been fairly steady over the last few years the flash-in-the-pan, up-to-the-minute news cycle has not had much to report regarding increased temperatures. However, the policy in Washington and much of today’s popular culture still maintains, as a certainty, the threat humans pose to our climate.

This in mind, I came to the event wondering how 14 experts were going to dissuade and counter what has been so widely touted. What’s more, if they were persuasive, I was more than a little curious how I would solve the potential dissonance in my mind, knowing that the two sides can’t both be right. And if these experts are right, then one needs to ask how so many millions of people can be wrong and/or be led astray.

Climate was the topic but weather initiated interference this day as tornado sirens howled across the metro that afternoon (good thing the founder of the Weather Channel was there!).

When things did get started, former MN State Senator Rudy Boschwitz took the podium and introduced the keynote speaker of the event, Dr. Fred Singer. Dr. Singer is a regarded expert in the field of climatology, having been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Time magazine, and scores of other outlets. He has lectured to the science faculties at Berkeley, Stanford, Copenhagen University, and several other renowned academic institutions and has received numerous honors for his lifetime of contribution from various associations including NASA.