I'm heading to New York tomorrow (at my own expense) for a conference organized by the Heartland Institute and billed as "The world's largest-ever gathering of global warming sceptics." The conference is being held at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, where I've had the pleasure of staying before.

I'm in a room overlooking the square, whose spectacular electronic billboards represent one of the great symbols of our joyous, multi-coloured, larger-than-life, technologically-stunning consumer society.

Times Square also last year witnessed the success of those who wish to dim the lights on such despised materialism. Coca Cola agreed to flip the switch on its thirty-ton "electro kinetic sculpture" during Earth Hour, that exercise in social and corporate pressure, organized by the World Wildlife Fund, during which people wander around in the dark for the sake of the planet.

The theme of the Heartland conference -- "Global warming: Was it ever really a crisis?" -- seems deliberately designed to cause the kind of people who so successfully strong armed Coca Cola to froth at the mouth.

This second such annual event will feature dozens of presentations by a class of people claimed not to exist by environmental extremists:
Including top scientists and other researchers who question the conclusions of the United Nations' highly-politicized Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC claims that the climate may already be in crisis (as opposed to Al Gore, who claims that it definitely is), and that humans are the main culprits due to industrial society's emissions of carbon dioxide.

The Heartland conference will present papers suggesting that such views are at best simplistic and at worst downright wrong. It will also feature bold voices who stress the political nature of the climate change bandwagon, and its success in closing down debate as it threatens already foundering global prosperity. These include Vaclav Kraus, president of the Czech Republic and of the European Union.

Apart from bringing together eco-psychologists (who knew the division of academic labour had gone to such bizarre lengths!), psychotherapists and that universal threat, "social researchers," the Bristol conference will unashamedly feature "climate change activists," who are "uniquely qualified to assess the human dimensions of this human-made problem."

According to one of the conference's keynote speakers, George Marshall, director of something called Climate Outreach and Information Network,