Primary contact: James Taylor, Senior Fellow of The Heartland Institute, taylor@heartland.org.

The debate over whether human activity is responsible for some or all of the modern warming, and then what to do if our presence on Earth is indeed affecting the global climate, has enormous consequences for everyone in virtually all parts of the globe. Proposals to drive down human greenhouse emissions by raising energy costs or imposing draconian caps could dramatically affect the quality of life of people in developed countries, and due to globalization, the lives of people in less developed countries too.

The global warming debate that the public and policymakers usually see is one-sided, dominated by government scientists and government organizations that are agenda-driven to find data that suggests a human impact on climate and to call for immediate government action, if only to fund their own continued research, but often to achieve political agendas entirely unrelated to the science of climate change. There is another side, but in recent years it has been denied a platform from which to speak.

The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change is the first major conference bringing together the world's leading scholars who question the alleged "consensus" that the modern warming is largely man-made or would be catastrophic. It promises to be an exciting event, and the point of departure for future conferences, publications, and educational campaigns to finally present both sides of this important topic.