The Heritage Foundation - Leadership for America

The final day of the conference begins with breakfast with the Honorable John Henry Sununu, former governor of New Hampshire and former White House Chief of Staff under George H.W. Bush. Sununu, as Heritage analyst Ben Lieberman often notes, asserts that the global warming environmental activists are anti-growth, anti-development proponents in disguise.

As former Chief of Staff, Sununu has experience dealing with environmental activists. He tells a story of global warming proponents knocking on the White House door warning if the United States doesn’t enact a global warming policy, the world will face serious repercussions. The activists pointed to scientific models, but these models were subsequently questioned and it was found that many gaping holes existed in the models, such as not accounting for oceanic effects.

Sununu says the White House increased the budget for climate funding research from a few hundred million to $1.5 billion per year – and now stands at $10 billion per year. But the return on the investment has been small. Clarifying the science and separating fact from myth still remains quite difficult.

Sununu believes that to avert a policy disaster, the real battle will be to win over the public opinion to influence policymakers. We need to get the science right through data quality and assurance and not let cherry-picked facts dictate policy.

The second speaker at breakfast is Harvard astronomer Willie Soon. Dr. Soon is known for his tireless work advocating that solar activity and not man-made emissions is the leading variable behind the earth’s temperature change. He recently told Al Gore he “strongly disagreed” with his stance on global warming.

The focus of Soon’s speech is removing politics from science, a large challenge. Soon argues the “magical” CO2 known for controlling the weather and climate simply does not exist. In other words, there’s no CO2 dial we can turn up or down that will have any real effects on temperature change. He emphasizes that sun-induced climate change theories are making significant progress, which is largely Soon’s own doing.

Soon asks an important question: What happens if we find out carbon dioxide is not a pollutant that has significant effects on global temperature and once we spend trillions of dollars to regulate it, it disrupts the CO2 vital for plant and marine life?

He warns it could be an ecological disaster. Soon is one of the best and his work is well worth researching and reading.