LETTERS
To the Editor:

Earlier this week the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC), attended by some 500 scientists, economists, and other experts on global warming from at least 11 countries, finished up with Joseph L. Bast, president of The Heartland Institute (host of the event), reporting that the " message was deceptively simple: Global warming is not a crisis." As he put it, " History may well note that the long and largely unimpeded march of error, exaggeration, and even lies in the campaign to turn climate change into a global 'crisis' hit a bump in March 2008, when the advocates of sound science and common sense finally came together to expose and confront it." This may come as a surprise to many, especially those who have succumbed to the mainstream media's biased and alarmist coverage of the global warming issue. To them, and to those who have been beguiled by Al Gore's documentary, "The Inconvenient Truth," (this includes such noted climatologists as Barbara Streisand, Brad Pitt, Joanne Woodward, Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, and Leonardo DiCaprio), an antidote is available. In his book titled, "Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media," climatologist Patrick J. Michaels describes how we have been led astray by falsehood, exaggeration and misstatement, and he dismantles the claim that catastrophic climate change is upon us. Michaels holds a Ph.D. in ecological climatology from the U of WI at Madison, is research professor of environmental sciences at the University of VIA and visiting scientist with the Marshall Institute in DC, is past president of the American Association of State Climatologists, was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society …there's more, but you get the point. Michaels was the keynote speaker on the evening of the first day of the of the ICCC where he confuted the claims of "unprecedented" sea ice melting in the Arctic and warming in the Antarctic, citing evidence that temperatures were warmer in the Artic during the 1930s, and the vast majority of Antarctica is cooling. Contrary to charges against him, Michaels does not deny warming (according to him, "almost every scientist I know acknowledges that the planet is warmer than it was a few decades ago and that the burning of fossil fuel has contributed to the warming of recent decades"). What he does deny, is that the rate of warming is cause for alarm, or that any policy will do anything to alter the warming trajectory we are on enough to measure its effect in a lifetime. During his presentation Michaels demonstrated that the most realistic forecast for future warming is a linear increase of about 0.17 degrees F per decade, well below the most conservative estimates of global warming alarmists, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And this is right in line with the closing remark of Joseph L. Bast on the ICCC, that "Global warming is not a crisis." In plain language, we can relax, because it ain't gonna get that warm.

Cordially, Chuck Esposito, Suches, Ga.