Covert army unit played role in Menezes tube killing

Anti-terror troops deployed in Northern Ireland present at Tube shooting

The Observer | Mar 8, 2009

By  Henry McDonald

A controversial covert British Army unit that has been deployed in Northern Ireland to counter dissident republican terrorists was involved in the security operation that ended in the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, sources have revealed.

Soldiers of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment were present in London in July 2005 on the day Scotland Yard firearms specialists shot dead the innocent Brazilian at Stockwell underground station, believing he was a terrorist.

Although officially the regiment was not “deployed” that day, its soldiers provided “technical support” for Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist operation, the Observer has learnt.

Reports last week of the regiment’s deployment in Northern Ireland caused a political storm, with Sinn Féin deputy first minister Martin McGuinness saying it was “stupid and dangerous” and adding that it had “shaken his confidence” in Northern Ireland’s police chief.

Sir Hugh Orde, chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, said he had been provided with a “tiny number of specialists” to counter the threat from dissident republicans, which he said was “severe”.

Security sources said the regiment was formed over four years ago as a “roving” surveillance unit. “It has a global role and can be sent all over the world to work alongside existing military personnel on the ground. It is basically a new name for the amalgamation of the 14 Intelligence and Security Group – or ‘the Det’ [Detachment], as it was known – with bits and pieces of other special forces,” the sources said.

“They work on close-quarter covert surveillance. The surveillance equipment they have is out of this world. It is the best kit in the world. They will be able to provide camera feeds from a suspect’s home and be able to watch it miles away in a base.”

The sources said the regiment, smaller than the SAS, was about 150 strong, the size of a full company.

Orde’s warning of the dissident threat arises partly from their acquisition of new bomb-making techniques. The threat level was raised after a dissidents’ bomb was defused in Castlewellan, Co Down, last month. Security sources this weekend told the Observer that the 300lb device was fitted with an extra “anti-handling” system that made it dangerous for Army technical officers to defuse.

The Special Reconnaissance Regiment has been called in because of the PSNI’s lack of manpower and experience in anti-terrorist surveillance operations.

The revelation that a company of undercover soldiers is operational in Northern Ireland will cause huge embarrassment for Sinn Féin and provide a propaganda coup for the dissidents. The Real IRA’s political allies, the 32-County Sovereignty Committee, said the deployment of the regiment came as no surprise, and showed that Britain had “failed to pacify Ireland”.

The Observer has also learnt that Orde failed to inform the Northern Ireland Policing Board’s chairman, Sir Des Rea, about his decision to bring in the undercover regiment.

Out of chaos, a New World Order

“An international order will emerge…”

WND | Mar 9, 2009

By Joseph Farah

Henry Kissinger wrote a very important article in the International Herald Tribune Jan. 12.

I believe it was meant as a signal – marching orders, if you will, for a disparate band of elitists determined to bring about a new form of global rule that will supersede our notions of national sovereignty, limited government and personal freedom.

I would also offer it up as exhibit A in making the case that our current financial crisis is almost entirely manufactured by forces trying to bring about the long-hailed “new world order.”

Here is how that plan is going to work: America, the most prosperous and freest nation on earth, will be brought to its knees in an economic leveling process that will purposely make it reliant on other nations of the world – so much so that America will, in the hopes of people like Kissinger and David Rockefeller, eagerly accept and submit to world government.

I urge you to read Kissinger’s entire article for yourself, but, even two months later, it is impossible to interpret it in any other way than as a blueprint for what Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress would do with their “unique opportunity.”

“That opportunity involves a seeming contradiction,” Kissinger wrote. “On one level, the financial collapse represents a major blow to the standing of the United States. While American political judgments have often proved controversial, the American prescription for a world financial order has generally been unchallenged. Now disillusionment with the United States’ management of it is widespread.”

Kissinger goes on to say that every nation will be tempted to act independently to extricate itself from the “crisis” or “debacle.” However, this course of action will be futile and counterproductive. Only “common action” will be acceptable.

“Even the most affluent countries will confront shrinking resources,” he continued. “Each will have to redefine its national priorities. An international order will emerge if a system of compatible priorities comes into being. It will fragment disastrously if the various priorities cannot be reconciled.”

Kissinger added: “The alternative to a new international order is chaos.”

In other words, that’s the choice – chaos or submission to rule by an unaccountable global elite.

Kissinger goes on to predict what will happen – and is happening already: There would be “rescue packages” designed by domestic governments relying on seemingly unlimited credit – the mirage that created the crisis in the first place.

Since the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union, Kissinger explains, there has been a “period of nearly uninterrupted global growth.” That fact “induced too many to equate world order with the acceptance of American designs, including our domestic preferences.”

That, to Henry Kissinger and his global banking masters, is undesirable.

And here’s where Barack Obama fits into the plan: “Not since the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy half a century ago has a new administration come into office with such a reservoir of expectations. It is unprecedented that all the principal actors on the world stage are avowing their desire to undertake the transformations imposed on them by the world crisis in collaboration with the United States. The extraordinary impact of the president-elect on the imagination of humanity is an important element in shaping a new world order. But it defines an opportunity, not a policy.”

Kissinger hints that even the fear-inducing terror of the global jihad may be part of the orchestrated plot by the masters of the universe.

“The ultimate challenge is to shape the common concern of most countries and all major ones regarding the economic crisis, together with a common fear of jihadist terrorism, into a common strategy reinforced by the realization that the new issues like proliferation, energy and climate change permit no national or regional solution,” he writes.

Kissinger then hits on the major contributing factor to America’s economic crisis – its abandonment of a manufacturing economy and its transformation into a debt-based consumption economy.

“China made possible the American consumption splurge by buying American debt; America helped the modernization and reform of the Chinese economy by opening its markets to Chinese goods,” he writes. “Both sides overestimated the durability of this arrangement. But while it lasted, it sustained unprecedented global growth. It mitigated as well the concerns over China’s role once China emerged in full force as a fellow superpower. A consensus had developed according to which adversarial relations between these pillars of the international system would destroy much that had been achieved and benefit no one. That conviction needs to be preserved and reinforced.”

No one knows more about this subject than Kissinger. He was the grand maestro – even to the point of becoming a well-compensated agent of the Chinese in the process.

What Kissinger and his friends in the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg Group want to see and construct is a “permanent” form of global governance. They seek to serve as the architects of a new empire.

“An international order can be permanent only if its participants have a share not only in building but also in securing it. In this manner, America and its potential partners have a unique opportunity to transform a moment of crisis into a vision of hope,” he concludes.

Look for more directed chaos from the masters of the universe.

They believe it serves their interests well.

Buffett: GOP should unite behind Obama after “Economic Pearl Harbor”

“I think that the Republicans have an obligation to recognize this as an economic war and realize you need one leader,” he said in a pitch for leaders to unite the way they did after Pearl Harbor.

New York Daily News | Mar 9, 2009

After saying the economy has “fallen off a cliff,” legendary investor Warren Buffett this morning rapped political leaders for not being united enough in dealing with what he called an “economic Pearl Harbor” about six months ago.

Buffett, who supported Barack Obama in the election, didn’t let Democrats skate, but he particularly singled out the GOP.

“They really do have an obligation to support things that are clearly designed to fight the war in a big way,” Buffett said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” this morning.

“I think that the Republicans have an obligation to recognize this as an economic war and realize you need one leader,” he said in a pitch for leaders to unite the way they did after Pearl Harbor.

Related

Buffett: crisis is an economic Pearl Harbor

But he also said he understood why the GOP might gripe, since the Democrats have been using the crisis to push all sorts of things.

“You can’t expect people to unite behind you if you’re trying to jam a bunch of things down their throat,” Buffett said.

The Oracle of Omaha also hasn’t been entirely impressed with the way the White House and Congress have been explaining the huge problems to America.

“We’ve had muddled messages,” he said.

Nevertheless, he echoed President Obama’s position that government has a huge role to play in getting the economy working again, which Buffet said could take five years if things go poorly.

“Government is going to play an enormous factor in how fast it (confidence) comes back,” Buffett said.

Sen. Joe Lieberman now sings Obama’s praises

U.S. President Barack Obama (L) is embraced by U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman after Obama delivered a primetime address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, February 24, 2009. Reuters

AP | Mar 9, 2009

By ANDREW MIGA

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. Joe Lieberman has changed his tune on Barack Obama. After campaigning across the country for Republican John McCain in 2008 and attacking Obama as naive, untested and unwilling to take on powerful special interests, Lieberman now showers praise on the popular new Democratic president.

“He’s shown real leadership,” Lieberman told The Associated Press in an interview. “Bottom line: I think Barack Obama, president of the United States, is off to a very good start.”

The Connecticut independent, who faces re-election in 2012 in a state where Obama is popular, is eager to mend fences with Democrats still fuming over his criticism of Obama during the general election campaign.

Lieberman has applauded Obama’s national security team. He gushed over Obama’s “inspirational and unifying” inaugural. Lieberman even played a key role helping Obama win Senate passage of the economic stimulus plan.

As if to underscore the point, Lieberman has even clashed on the Senate floor with his pal McCain over the stimulus plan and a District of Columbia voting rights bill.

“I don’t think of Joe as the independent, I really think of Joe as a Democrat,” said Lieberman’s home state colleague, Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.

It’s a striking turnaround from the days when Lieberman was a fixture at McCain’s side during campaign stops. McCain had even considered making Lieberman, who nearly won the vice presidency on the Democratic ticket with Al Gore in 2000, his running mate.

“Do I think it is more principle or politics?” said Quinnipiac University Poll director Doug Schwartz of Lieberman’s moves. “It is a tough question.”

Lieberman’s campaigning for McCain hurt him with Connecticut voters, particularly Democrats, Schwartz said.

Connecticut’s Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who is mentioned as a possible 2012 Senate Democratic candidate, would beat Lieberman by 28 points in a hypothetical matchup, a recent Quinnipiac poll showed.

Lieberman scoffed at any suggestion his embrace of Obama is more about political expediency than principle.

“I haven’t changed … I’ve always had a voting record that is more with the Democrats than with the Republicans,” he said.

Many Democrats still chafe at how Lieberman needled Obama during his Republican National Convention speech with the line “eloquence is no substitute for a record.”

Or when Lieberman cast the race as a choice between “one candidate, John McCain, who has always put the country first, worked across party lines to get things done, and one candidate who has not. Between one candidate who’s a talker, and the other candidate who’s the leader America needs as our next president.”

Lieberman said he understands why he struck a nerve with Obama’s backers.

“We were in the middle of a campaign and we just plain disagreed … When I said those things not only did I believe them, but I believe looking at the records of the two people then, they were right,” Lieberman said.

Lieberman said he never meant to suggest that Obama did not put his country first. Lieberman said his words were “too subject” to that interpretation and that he wishes he had spoken more clearly.

After the election at Obama’s urging, Senate Democrats decided not to punish Lieberman. They voted to let him keep his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Obama was eager to strike a bipartisan tone for his presidency.

“President Obama played a very important role, he was very gracious,” said Lieberman, who has since called Obama to thank him. “That obviously sealed the deal and I appreciated it a lot.”

Liberal bloggers fumed. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent, called it a “slap in the face” for millions of Americans who backed Obama.

But Democrats need Lieberman’s support in a chamber where it takes 60 of the 100 senators to overcome the threat of a Republican filibuster. They feared punishing Lieberman could drive him to the GOP. Lieberman remains a registered Democrat and caucuses with Senate Democrats.

Lieberman was re-elected in 2006 as an independent after losing his state’s Democratic primary to wealthy businessman Ned Lamont, an anti-war candidate.

Top Democrats like Dodd and Obama who had supported Lieberman in the primary instead backed party nominee Lamont in the fall race. Lieberman was disappointed that some old friends weren’t loyal to him.

“Joe is gonna do what’s in his interest politically because he had a near-death experience,” said Tad Devine, a Democratic strategist who advised Lieberman in 2000. “Losing the party nomination has given him enormous freedom to think and to do as he wants.”

Merck Takeover Fuels Speculation of Drug Industry Merger Wave

Bloomberg | Mar 9, 2008

By Trista Kelley

Merck & Co.’s $41.1 billion purchase of Schering-Plough Corp. fueled speculation it won’t be the last big drug-industry merger.

The deal, which comes on the heels of Pfizer Inc.’s $68 billion bid for Wyeth in January and Roche Holding AG’s $45.7 billion offer for U.S. partner Genentech Inc. last week, will spur other drugmakers fearful of falling behind into action, said David Moskowitz, an analyst with Caris & Co. in Washington, D.C.

Sanofi-Aventis SA may next target Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., which sells the French company’s Plavix blood-thinner and the Avapro hypertension treatment in the U.S. Alternatively, Bristol- Myers may be a potential merger partner for U.K. diabetes drug partner AstraZeneca Plc, said Mirabaud analyst Nick Turner. Johnson & Johnson may make a counter bid for Schering-Plough, Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Tim Anderson wrote in a note to clients.

“Most companies now are pretty cheap, really, and anyone sitting on cash can make a bid,” London-based Turner said today in an interview. “This is a trigger for a wave of mergers and acquisitions in the sector.”

The world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies, hoarding about $100 billion in cash, near cash and marketable securities, are seeking acquisitions to replace products nearing the end of their patent life. Merck’s takeover of Schering-Plough, announced today, would win the U.S. drugmaker a larger experimental pipeline and products unhindered by imminent patent losses.

AstraZeneca Gains

AstraZeneca climbed 76 pence, or 3.5 percent, to 2,223 pence in London trading, the most since Jan. 23, on speculation Bristol-Myers would make a bid. AstraZeneca spokeswoman Sarah Lindgreen said the company doesn’t comment on market speculation. Bristol-Myers spokesman Brian Henry also declined to comment.

Sanofi Chief Executive Officer Chris Viehbacher, while not ruling out a large merger, is looking for “small to medium- sized” acquisitions to replace revenue it expects to lose to generic competition in coming years, the 48-year-old executive said last month.

Viehbacher told CNBC in a March 5 interview that the French company’s partnership with Bristol-Myers is “sufficient” for the time being.

Other drugmakers have said they will avoid large mergers. Andrew Witty, head of GlaxoSmithKline Plc, said last month a large transaction would “distract” the company. Glaxo will rely on agreements valued from about $50 million to the “low billions,” he said in a January interview.

AstraZeneca chief David Brennan also favors licensing deals to shore up its pipeline of new products.

Pfizer has lost 7.5 percent of its value since completing its acquisition of Pharmacia Corp. in 2003. Glaxo’s shares have declined 25 percent since the U.K. drugmaker bought Smithkline Beecham Plc in 2000.

“If you can name a merger that worked, I’ll personally give you a bouquet of flowers,” said Mirabaud’s Turner.

Thai website owner arrested for comments posted about the monarchy

‘Thailand has unleashed one of the most aggressive crackdowns on internet freedom seen anywhere in Asia and we strongly urge them to reverse course.’

—Bob Dietz, Committee to Protect Journalists

Thai website editor arrested for threatening national security

CBC News | Mar 8, 2009

Thai police arrested the editor of a leading political website that carries content not often published in Thai newspapers.

Police went to the Bangkok offices of Prachatai on Friday and arrested Chiranuch Premchaiporn, who founded the popular site five years ago.

They detained her on a charge of carrying computer content that threatens national security — which has a five-year maximum jail sentence. She was released later the same day after posting bail.

Prachati is known for its independent reports on the conflict between government forces and Muslim rebels in the country’s three southernmost provinces.

According to the BBC, a police official said Premchaiporn was arrested because there were comments on the site posted by readers concerning the monarchy.

Under Thai laws, criticism of the monarchy is forbidden. King Bhumibol Adulyadej is highly revered in his country. Thai authorities have been increasingly intolerant of any whiff of criticism of the monarchy.

The arrest occurred on the same day Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva told a meeting of news editors that he would restore Thailand’s press freedom reputation.

Thousands of websites blocked

“I call upon the relevant authorities to immediately cease and desist from harassing all online journalists and commentators like Chiranuch Premchaiporn,” said Bob Dietz, Asia program director for the Committee to Protect Journalists, in a statement on Friday.

“Thailand has unleashed one of the most aggressive crackdowns on internet freedom seen anywhere in Asia and we strongly urge them to reverse course.”

Thousands of websites have been blocked, and a number of people charged and arrested over the past year, including an Australian author who was sentenced in January to three years in prison for insulting the king and the crown prince.

Harry Nicolaides, 41, was charged because of a passage in his 2005 self-published novel Verisimilitude, which sold only seven copies.

However, he was swiftly pardoned by the King on Feb. 19 and whisked back to Melbourne, Australia.

Freedom of expression groups and journalist organizations have condemned Thailand’s strict laws concerning the monarchy, saying it’s often used to shut down criticism of the police or the government.

Lake Superior freezes over for second time in past decade

netnewsledger.com | Mar 9, 2009

Thunder Bay, ON — The climate website Wattsupwiththat reports, “Lake Superior last froze over in 2003. It has now, again, frozen over. The frequency of freeze overs has historically been around once every 20 years. Now, in the last decade, we have seen two freeze overs”.

The image from the U.S. based NOAA taked on March 3, 2009 shows the degree of ice coverage on the lake.

NOAA reports, “Due to the recent cold spell and below normal temperatures for much of the winter of 2008-2009, ice covers nearly all of Lake Superior. Only small areas of open water remain. This image was taken on Tuesday, March 3rd. If arctic air does not return in the next couple of weeks, it is likely that this will be the day of maximum ice cover on Lake Superior for this winter as warmer weather and periods of stronger winds through the end of this week will cause open water areas to expand”.

Czech President Klaus defends position of climate-change skeptics

Earth Times | Mar 9, 2009

New York – Czech President Vaclav Klaus defended scientists and others who question the prevailing opinion on global warming late Sunday in New York, to open a conference of climate-change skeptics. An outspoken critic of the United Nations and Western governments that hold the view that climate change is caused by human activity, Klaus has become the standardbearer for a group for scientists and organizations believing that natural forces are more likely behind whatever climate change might currently be underway.

“It’s difficult to change their minds,” Klaus told an audience of about 1,000 attendees at the New York Marriott Marquis hotel at Times Square. “They subscribe to the IPCC reports.”

He denounced politicians for backing the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), business and industry leaders for profiting from the anti-climate change campaign and “irresponsible” scientists for rushing to the conclusion that extensive use of fossil fuels and other human activities hare causing global warming.

Klaus’ position on climate change has been awkward for the European Union. The Czech Republic currently holds the six-month presidency of the EU, which has called for strong action to reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases believed to be causing global warming.

The IPCC reports issued last year found that Earth’s temperatures have already reached crisis proportions and that human activities are key to driving them up with the release of carbon dioxide.

“They take climate change for granted,” he said, complaining that his group of doubters has been branded “naive” by proponents of anti- climate change.

The 2009 International Conference on Climate Change is sponsored by the Chicago-based Heartland Institute and supported by close to 60 business and civil-society groups.

Where’s global warming?

For many people, the science of climate change is not nearly as important as the religion of climate change.

Boston Globe | Mar 8, 2009

By Jeff Jacoby

Half the country was experiencing its mildest winter in years, with no sign of snow in many Northern states. Most of the Great Lakes were ice-free. Not a single Canadian province had had a white Christmas. There was a new study discussing a mysterious surge in global temperatures – a warming trend more intense than computer models had predicted. Other scientists admitted that, because of a bug in satellite sensors, they had been vastly overestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice.

If all that were happening on the climate-change front, do you think you’d be hearing about it on the news? Seeing it on Page 1 of your daily paper? Would politicians be exclaiming that global warming was even more of a crisis than they’d thought? Would environmentalists be skewering global-warming “deniers” for clinging to their skepticism despite the growing case against it?

No doubt.

But it isn’t such hints of a planetary warming trend that have been piling up in profusion lately. Just the opposite.

The United States has shivered through an unusually severe winter, with snow falling in such unlikely destinations as New Orleans, Las Vegas, Alabama, and Georgia. On Dec. 25, every Canadian province woke up to a white Christmas, something that hadn’t happened in 37 years. Earlier this year, Europe was gripped by such a killing cold wave that trains were shut down in the French Riviera and chimpanzees in the Rome Zoo had to be plied with hot tea. Last week, satellite data showed three of the Great Lakes – Erie, Superior, and Huron – almost completely frozen over. In Washington, D.C., what was supposed to be a massive rally against global warming was upstaged by the heaviest snowfall of the season, which paralyzed the capital.

Meanwhile, the National Snow and Ice Data Center has acknowledged that due to a satellite sensor malfunction, it had been underestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles – an area the size of Spain. In a new study, University of Wisconsin researchers Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonis conclude that global warming could be going into a decades-long remission. The current global cooling “is nothing like anything we’ve seen since 1950,” Swanson told Discovery News. Yes, global cooling: 2008 was the coolest year of the past decade – global temperatures have not exceeded the record high measured in 1998, notwithstanding the carbon-dioxide that human beings continue to pump into the atmosphere.

None of this proves conclusively that a period of planetary cooling is irrevocably underway, or that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are not the main driver of global temperatures, or that concerns about a hotter world are overblown. Individual weather episodes, it always bears repeating, are not the same as broad climate trends.

But considering how much attention would have been lavished on a comparable run of hot weather or on a warming trend that was plainly accelerating, shouldn’t the recent cold phenomena and the absence of any global warming during the past 10 years be getting a little more notice? Isn’t it possible that the most apocalyptic voices of global-warming alarmism might not be the only ones worth listening to?

There is no shame in conceding that science still has a long way to go before it fully understands the immense complexity of the Earth’s ever-changing climate(s). It would be shameful not to concede it. The climate models on which so much global-warming alarmism rests “do not begin to describe the real world that we live in,” says Freeman Dyson, the eminent physicist and futurist. “The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand.”

But for many people, the science of climate change is not nearly as important as the religion of climate change. When Al Gore insisted yet again at a conference last Thursday that there can be no debate about global warming, he was speaking not with the authority of a man of science, but with the closed-minded dogmatism of a religious zealot. Dogma and zealotry have their virtues, no doubt. But if we want to understand where global warming has gone, those aren’t the tools we need.

Skeptics Dispute Climate Worries and Each Other

The Greener Horizon booth at the conference promoted a film made by Phelim McAleer, left, and Magdalena Segieda, right.

NY Times | Mar 8, 2009

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

More than 600 self-professed climate skeptics are meeting in a Times Square hotel this week to challenge what has become a broad scientific and political consensus: that without big changes in energy choices, humans will dangerously heat up the planet.

The three-day International Conference on Climate Change — organized by the Heartland Institute, a nonprofit group seeking deregulation and unfettered markets — brings together political figures, conservative campaigners, scientists, an Apollo astronaut and the president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus.

Organizers say the discussions, which began Sunday, are intended to counter the Obama administration and Democratic lawmakers, who have vowed to tackle global warming with legislation requiring cuts in the greenhouse gases that scientists have linked to rising temperatures.

But two years after the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded with near certainty that most of the recent warming was a result of human influences, global warming’s skeptics are showing signs of internal rifts and weakening support.

The meeting participants hold a wide range of views of climate science. Some concede that humans probably contribute to global warming but they argue that the shift in temperatures poses no urgent risk. Others attribute the warming, along with cooler temperatures in recent years, to solar changes or ocean cycles.

But large corporations like Exxon Mobil, which in the past financed the Heartland Institute and other groups that challenged the climate consensus, have reduced support. Many such companies no longer dispute that the greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels pose risks.

From 1998 to 2006, Exxon Mobil, for example, contributed more than $600,000 to Heartland, according to annual reports of charitable contributions from the company and company foundations.

Alan T. Jeffers, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil, said by e-mail that the company had ended support “to several public policy research groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion about how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.”

Joseph L. Bast, the president of the Heartland Institute, said Exxon and other companies were just shifting their stance to improve their image. The Heartland meeting, he said, was the last bastion of intellectual honesty on the climate issue.

“Major corporations are painting themselves green around global warming,” Mr. Bast said, adding that the companies have shifted their lobbying and public relations efforts toward trying to shape climate legislation in their favor. He said that contributions, over all, had continued to rise.

But Kert Davies, a climate campaigner for Greenpeace, who is attending the Heartland event, said that the experts giving talks were “a shrinking collection of extremists” and that they were “left talking to themselves.”

Organizers expected to top the attendance of about 500 at the first Heartland conference, held last year. They also point to the speaker’s roster, which included Mr. Klaus and Harrison Schmitt, a geologist, Apollo astronaut and former senator.

A centerpiece of the 2008 meeting was the release of a report, “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Planet.” The document was expressly designed as a challenge to the reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

This year, the meeting will focus on a more nuanced question: “Global warming: Was it ever a crisis?”

Most of the talks at the meeting will challenge climate orthodoxy. But some presenters, including prominent figures who have been vocal in their criticism in the past, say they will also call on their colleagues to synchronize the arguments they are using against plans to curb greenhouse gases.

In a keynote talk Sunday night, Richard S. Lindzen, a professor at M.I.T. and a longtime skeptic of the mainstream consensus that global warming poses a danger, first delivered a biting attack on what he called the “climate alarm movement.”

There is no solid scientific evidence to back up the models used by climate scientists who warn of dire consequences if warming continues, he said. But Dr. Lindzen also criticized widely publicized assertions by other skeptics that variations in the sun were driving temperature changes in recent decades. To attribute short-term variation in temperatures to a single cause, whether human-generated gases or something else, is erroneous, he said.

Speaking of the sun’s slight variability, he said, “Acting as though this is the alternative” to blaming greenhouse gases “is asking for trouble.”

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