Some thoughts as I try to tie up loose ends so I can leave tomorrow morning for PlantSuccess in Houston.

For nearly a decade, all we heard was "global warming" and the threats to the environment and the society it would produce. This caused enormous controversy. Partisans on both sides (maybe there are more than two sides), all sides, have distorted and falsified data to make their cases.

But the fact remains that climate is changing, and the growing human population, and industrialization are having some effect on the changes.

Here's the scope of the Thursday session, next week, at PlantSuccess in Houston:

The upcoming PlantSuccess, our 9th annual event at the Hilton Houston NASA Clear Lake, features

Next Wednesday and Thursday, the Houston version of Carl Howk's PlantSuccess conference will be held in Clear Lake, Texas. The event has been expanded from one to one-and-a-half days, to accommodate a pre-conference session. I am honored to be asked to speak at this session, since nearly all of the speakers at Carl's events are end-user leaders like the other speakers on the list below.

Yesterday, Carl Howk, chairman of PlantSuccess, sent this out in his newsletter. I thought it worth repeating.

Here's an announcement from Carl Howk, Chairman of the PlantSuccess conference. Now, I understand that many of us have travel restrictions in place this year because of the economy, but if you can make this conference, I strongly urge you to. Carl gets some significant brainpower from the processing industries all in the same room three or four times a year, and has been doing it for nearly a decade now.

Next up was a series of five minute "commercials" from Carl's Solution Partners. It was interesting to note that the only one of the Big Six automation companies present was Siemens, and the Wonderware Mobile Solutions division of Invensys. One wonders if the listing of automation so far down in Hermann Ortega's list would happen if the big automation providers attended PlantSuccess. Even Honeywell Process Solutions, Ortega's solution partner and sister company, was absent from the sponsor list.

After his keynote, Ortega took his place in a panel that was made up of former PlantSuccess keynoters, including Tom Archibald, vice president and director of engineering and operations for Rohm and Haas Company, now a division of Dow Chemical Company; Jim Porter, the recently retired Chief Engineer and vice president for engineering and operations from DuPont; Tom Strang, vice president of manufacturing excellence for Hercules Inc., and Doug Foran, president of Red Branch Technologies.

For the past five years, Carl Howk has been trying to get me to attend one of his PlantSuccess conferences. Howk holds three a year-- one in the Northeast, one on the Gulf Coast, and one in Canada this year. Next year's conferences will be April 16 at the Hilton Houston NASA Clear Lake, September 2009 at the Hotel Arts in Calgary, and in November at the Hotel DuPont in Wilmington, DE.