27. 07. 2025. 16:56

Dear colleagues,

Thanks again for supporting this petition!

Bad news I’m afraid. The ICMPC executive committee has decided to go ahead with the ESCOM proposal for a single-location conference in Helsinki in 2027. The decision was unclear until the end. One member of the committee decided at the last minute.

This petition and the 100 colleagues who signed it were essentially ignored. The same goes for the 10 colleagues who would have helped organize hubs, and the 100s who would have benefited from those hubs. All ignored! And that’s not even mentioning the victims of global warming.

For your interest, the 6 members of the ICMPC executive committee are listed here:
icmpc.org/icmpc_advisory.html. Scroll to the end.

Four of these six colleagues supported the ESCOM proposal for yet another single-location conference. Before doing that, they were reminded repeatedly about this petition and the 100 people who signed it. But they refused even to discuss the issues. In the end, the petition was supported only by the chair of the committee and myself.

The membership of the committee changes after every conference. The ICMPC in Brazil just happened. (I was not there, because I stopped flying to conferences in 2016.) I will now leave the committee and the organiser of the Brazil conference will join. The chair of the committee is generally the organiser of the second-last conference, so the chair will also change. If the committee was previously dominated by deniers, it will soon be even worse.

But this is not the end of this project. In fact, we are just getting started. History is certainly on our side. There are several possible ways to proceed. Please let me know how you think we might force the organizers to respect human rights. I need your suggestions!

Yours
Richard
parncutt at uni-graz.at