Sen. James Inhofe to Kick Off Heartland Institute?s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change on June 30

Washington, DC (PRWEB) June 29, 2011

Sen. James Inhofe, R-OK, the leading critic of global warming alarmism in Congress, will kick off The Heartland Institute?s sixth International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC-6) at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, June 30, with a breakfast keynote address.

(Watch the Live Stream of Heartland?s climate conference.)

Inhofe will be joined at the Marriott Wardman Park in Washington, DC by scores of state and federal elected officials, more than 50 think tank cosponsors, and some 300 scientists, economists, and policy experts who dispute the claim that ?the science is settled? on the causes, consequences, or policy implications of climate change.

Past conferences in this series took place in New York City, Chicago, Washington, DC and Sydney, Australia and have attracted more than 2,000 participants from 20 countries. The proceedings have been covered by ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News, the BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Le Monde, and most other leading media outlets.

ICCC-6 will feature presentations by more than two dozen scientists, economists, and elected officials commenting on the latest research on the causes, consequences, and policy implications of climate change. The line-up of speakers includes:

Timothy Ball, Ph.D., environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He was recently sued for libel by Michael Mann, a prominent figure in the Climategate scandal.

Barry Brill, OBE, New Zealand barrister and solicitor. He is a former minister of science & technology and minister of energy, and is currently chairman of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition.

Alan Carlin, Ph.D., former senior analyst and manager at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In March 2009 he authored a highly critical internal review of EPA?s draft report on endangerment from greenhouse gases, which led him to become a whistle-blower.

Robert ?Bob? Carter, Hon. FRSNZ, research professor at James Cook University (Queensland, Australia), where he was head of the School of Earth Sciences between 1981 and 1999. He is author of Climate: The Counter Consensus.

Scott Denning, Ph.D., professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University. Denning believes in man-caused global warming and spoke last year at the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago.

Christopher Horner, J.D., senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed.

Craig Idso, Ph.D., chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change and coauthor of Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.

Robert O. Mendelsohn, Ph.D., Edwin Weyerhaeuser Davis Professor of Forest Policy & Professor of Economics at Yale University and author of the forthcoming book Climate Change and Agriculture: An Economic Analysis of Global Impacts, Adaptation, and Distributional Effects.

Patrick J. Michaels, Ph.D., distinguished senior fellow in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University and a senior fellow in environmental policy at the Cato Institute. He is a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society and editor of the new book Climate Coup: Global Warming?s Invasion of Our Government and Our Lives.

Marc Morano, executive editor and chief correspondent for ClimateDepot.com, a global warming and eco-news center founded in 2009. Morano served for three years as a senior advisor, speechwriter, and climate researcher for the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

Nicola Scafetta, Ph.D., research scientist in the Duke University Physics Department. His research interests are in theoretical and applied statistics and nonlinear models of complex processes. He has published peer-reviewed papers in journals covering a wide variety of disciplines, including astronomy, biology, climatology, economics, and physics.

Harrison Schmitt, Ph.D., is a former NASA astronaut and U.S. Senator. He is the twelfth and last person to set foot on the Moon. He served as chair of the NASA Advisory Council and is currently adjunct professor of engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. He is a field geologist who received a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

David Schnare, Ph.D., J.D., senior fellow for energy and the environment for the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. He is an attorney and scientist with 32 years of federal and private-sector experience consulting on and litigating local, state, federal, and international environmental legislative, regulatory, risk management, and free-market environmentalism issues.

S. Fred Singer, Ph.D., founder and president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, coauthor of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years and Climate Change Reconsidered, and professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia.

Willie Soon, Ph.D., astrophysicist and a geoscientist at the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Roy W. Spencer, Ph.D., principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville where he directs a variety of climate research projects. He is the author of several books, including most recently, The Great Global Warming Blunder.

James M. Taylor, J.D., senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of its Environment & Climate News. He writes Climate Change Weekly, a Heartland e-newsletter, and a weekly column on climate change issues for Forbes.com.

David G. Tuerck, Ph.D., executive director of the Beacon Hill Institute, and professor and chairman of the Suffolk University Department of Economics.

Anthony Watts, a 25-year broadcast meteorology veteran and currently chief meteorologist for KPAY-AM radio. He hosts the popular climate change blog Wattsupwiththat.com and a Web site at surfacestations.org devoted to photographing and documenting the quality of weather stations across the U.S.

The theme of ICCC-6, ?Restoring the Scientific Method,? highlights the reliance of claims of scientific certainty and predictions of climate catastrophes on post-normal science, which substitutes claims of consensus for the scientific method. Abandoning the scientific method led to the Climategate scandal and the errors and abuses of peer review by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

For additional information, go to climateconference.heartland.org or call 312/377-4000. To arrange interviews with conference speakers, contact Director of Communications Jim Lakely at jlakely(at)heartland.org or 312/731-9364, or Media Specialist Tammy Nash at tnash@heartland.org or 312/731-9043. Register for media credentials here.

Get Twitter updates of the conference, and tweet your own coverage, by following @HeartlandInst and using the hashtag #ICCC6.

The Heartland Institute is a 27-year-old national nonprofit organization with offices in Chicago, Illinois; Washington, DC; Tallahassee, Florida; Austin, Texas; and Columbus, Ohio. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.

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CLIMsystems Receives 2011 CCBJ Business Achievement Award for Climate Change Adaptation Technology

Hamilton, New Zealand (PRWEB) January 25, 2012

Climate Change Business Journal? (CCBJ), a business research publication which provides high value strategic business intelligence to the climate change industry, has honored 31 companies for their contributions to mitigating climate change in 2011.

?CCBJ recognized a number of innovative projects that either broke ground or saw their way to completion in 2011 in wind, energy storage, carbon capture & storage and adaptation,? said Grant Ferrier, president of Environmental Business International Inc. (EBI, San Diego), publisher of Climate Change Business Journal.

CLIMsystems is pleased to announce that it was chosen to receive the CCBJ award for technology in the area of adaptation and risk assessment.

CLIMsystems was recognized for achieving a leading position in the climate change risk and adaptation assessment industry. Evidence of the firm?s accomplishment in this regard can be seen in the extensive citation of models generated with the company?s SimCLIM software. The guidance document on sea level rise issued in October 2011 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Task Group on Data and Scenario Support for Impacts and Climate Analysis shows SimCLIM?s unique abilities in sea level rise assessments.

CLIMsystems has taken technology developed in a university environment and made it commercially available for governments, research institutions, academics, multilateral lending agencies and consulting & engineering firms such as CLIMsystems? partners and affiliates CH2M HILL and Stratus Consulting. In 2011, the SimCLIM modeling system was used in coastal assessments in the Philippines and Alexandria, Virginia, USA. CLIMsystems has also assisted with capacity building and reporting for the UNFCCC Second National Communications Projects in Vanuatu, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, Solomon Islands, Nauru, and Eritrea. Further projects were completed in China on agriculture and climate change and bottom up and top down planning to ameliorate climate risk in Albay Province in the Philippines. Both Asian projects were funded through the Asia Pacific Network and supported by SimCLIM software and CLIMsystems expertise. Vietnam?s Institute of Meteorology, Hydrology, and Environment has also adopted the SimCLIM software system for climate assessments and Institute staff have received extensive training.

CLIMsystems? strength lies within the wide range of SimCLIM?s end users. Maelpo Maiai of Griffith University in Australia noted the he was ?truly fortunate to have been introduced to the team at CLIMsystems.? He found the SimCLIM software for climate risk and adaptation assessment to be user friendly and reliable, ?by using SimCLIM, I am able to test with a strong degree of confidence my research hypothesis on existing and future climate change and variability.?

Similarly Emily Gaskin who is a Policy Analyst with the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries/NOAA and is based in American Samoa was looking for useful tools to inform climate change management and to test adaptation strategies in marine and coastal areas. She found that ?SimCLIM was the perfect tool because it provided user-friendly models that I could apply and modify with minimal training. The visual outputs presented excellent policy tools to help inform management decisions and solicit grant funding to further our program goals.?

In New Zealand, Dr. Kathleen Kozyniak, Senior Scientist (Climate and Air) at Hawkes Bay Regional Council said "SimCLIM is very useful for getting a local perspective of climate change.? She particularly liked being able to input and analyse climate data from local sites, being able to choose between scenarios and sensitivities and to pick any year of interest. Kathleen also found it useful to have the impact models ? ?the water balance one proving useful for me.? She also was happy to know that the data would be updated with future Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments.

Software links have been developed between CLIMsystems? SimCLIM software system and the Decision Support Systems for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT) run by a consortium of Universities in the United States and the new eWater product range developed in Australia. The eWater software link was, in part, supported by a grant from the New Zealand Ministry of Science and Innovation. Links between SimCLIM and industry standard software products strengthens planning and decision making processes by permitting more software to be run with consideration of future climate change.

CLIMsystems is also the primary developer of GENIES (Global Environment and National Information Evaluation System) for climate change impact and cost-benefit analysis of adaptation options for urban areas. The GENIES project is being funded by the Asian Development Bank and will service five of the major global development banks covering the Asia-Pacific, Africa and Latin America.

CLIMsystems has also launched a new monitoring and evaluation (M & E) service for climate change adaptation and development projects. Monitoring and evaluation will ensure local needs are better met through an extra check and balance often missing from donor projects. Garath Johnson of Future Ready PTY in Australia said that ?local networks and knowledge are equally critical and I therefore welcome CLIMsystems initiative. CLIMsystems has local, regional and global adaptation experience backed by sector leading technology that is invaluable for decision makers.?

With a scientific advisory panel of Nobel laureates and leading climate scientists, as partners supporting software developments, training and service delivery, CLIMsystems is positioned to maintain leadership in understanding and translating climate science risk into decisions and action for climate resilience.

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