Howard Hayden

Learn more from the Center for Media and Democracy's research on climate change.

Howard C. Hayden is a "professor of physics emeritus in the Physics Department of the University of Connecticut, is editor of The Energy Advocate, a monthly newsletter promoting energy and technology." According to his profile on the Energy Advocate site, Hayden's research focus was "ionic & atomic collisions; charge transfer, ionization, energy loss, energy-level crossings, ion-surface collisions, ion implantation, relativity considerations" and "energy for society."

Hayden has authored two books through Vales Lake Publishing, LLC -- a Colorado-based business registered by Hayden himself. His books are titled "A Primer on CO2 and Climate" (2007) and "The Solar Fraud: Why Solar Energy Won't Run the World" (2005). The Vales Lake description of "A Primer on CO2 and Climate" states, "With only on weak correlations and computer models with many arbitrary coefficients, some fear mongers (including, but not limited to Al Gore) have expressed willingness to destroy the economies of the world by restricting energy production."

On global warming

Hayden is a speaker at the International Conference on Climate Change (2009) organized by the Heartland Institute think tank.

His Energy Advocate site states, "Perhaps there is global warming, and perhaps there is a human influence, and perhaps that is bad. But we are not on the global-warming bandwagon. ... There is no credible evidence that the temperature rise of the last century is anything out of the ordinary, and even less that a warmer earth would be less habitable than it is now. Nor will we attempt to scare readers with sea-rise, for it amounts to only the thickness of a nickel per year, as it has for millennia."

"You think SUVs are the cause of glaciers shrinking?" Hayden once asked. "Don't believe what you hear out of Hollywood and Washington, D.C.... [C]limate history proves that [Al] Gore has the relationship between carbon dioxide concentration and global warming backward. A higher concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not cause the Earth to be warmer. Instead, a warmer Earth causes the higher carbon dioxide levels."

Hayden signed onto a December 2007 open letter to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon that called global warming "a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages," called carbon dioxide "a non-polluting gas that is essential to plant photosynthesis," and claimed the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's reports "quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity." The letter also stated, "Recent observations of phenomena such as glacial retreats, sea-level rise and the migration of temperature-sensitive species are not evidence for abnormal climate change, for none of these changes has been shown to lie outside the bounds of known natural variability."

On nuclear power

"From the long-haired hippie carrying No Nukes placards to the tweedy philosophy professor writing learned antinuclear articles for the Sunday supplements; from the 'concerned homemaker' worried about her children's health to the Harvard economist expounding about the real and putative hidden costs of nuclear power -- nuclear power is maligned by all but the cognoscenti," Hayden wrote in an editorial for Nuclear News.

Articles and resources

Related SourceWatch articles

• Global warming skeptics
• Heartland Institute
• International Conference on Climate Change (2009)
• SourceWatch:Project:Creating Articles on Sponsors and Speakers at The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change

External articles

• Howard Hayden, "Debunking Global Warming Propaganda", Presentation to the Heartland Institute's International Conference on Climate Change (2009), March 10, 2009. (PowerPoint)

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