As you may have heard, the DeSmogBlog is sending a team to the Skeptics Magazine climate change conference coming up this weekend. It’s in Pasadena from June 2-4, 2006, and it’s called The Environmental Wars. We’ll be blogging and podcasting and generally keeping our readers up to speed on the action!

There’s been a fair amount of discussion about what the conference will entail. Michael Shermer is the host, and if you follow the world of climate change skeptics you have likely heard that he recently “changed teams.” See his piece in Scientific American for the scoop.

There are also a couple of well-known climate change skeptics on the roster – Michael Crichton and John Stossel. So we’re expecting things to be lively. Watch this space for the story as it unfolds!

But in the meantime, here’s what Shermer himself had to say to John Rennie on the Scientific American blog:

I understand there is some controversy over us including Michael Crichton and John Stossel on our program, which I expected–that’s why we are calling the conference “the environmental wars.” Ever since I was in college in the mid-1970s the subject has been loaded with political controversy, although in my opinion, over the decades the environmental “left” has done just as much distorting of the facts as the skeptical “right” has been accused of doing lately, and so I fail to see why having both “left wing” speakers and “right wing” speakers would not be a healthy thing. In point of fact, most of our speakers have no wings at all, but attendees can judge for themselves.

Indeed we will! Stay tuned. (If you aren’t already an RSS subscriber, your best bet is to sign up to the right to get email updates of our new posts every day.)