A number of scientists and members of think tanks are rejecting the popular consensus that humans are causing global warming and that carbon gas emissions pose a mounting threat to environmental stability.

Today, climatologists, economists, and free market advocates will gather in Time Square's Marriott Marquis Hotel for the final session of a three-day conference challenging what its sponsor, the Heartland Institute, calls the "public hysteria and alarmism about man-made" global warming.

"We have no power to affect global climate change, which will take us in whatever direction it may take us," a former business consultant, Christopher Monckton, said yesterday at the International Conference on Climate Change.

His remarks came shortly after a consortium of scientists released a report rebutting a U.N. panel's recent assertions that carbon gas emissions are contributing to the earth's current warming trend.

Far from being a product of human activity, this warming pattern is part of the climate's natural ebb and flow, the report's authors contend.

In their report, "Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate," a group of American university professors also argues that computer modeling technology cannot accurately predict changes in the climate system.

They also write that popular anti-global-warming campaigns have become "unnecessary, costly, and disruptive for energy security," as, in their opinion, carbon gas emissions pose a minimal threat to the climate.

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