President Vaclav Klaus delivered the keynote address this year to the World Federation of Scientists:
This brings me to the topic of my speech. I will try to argue that current as well as realistically foreseeable global warming, and especially Man’s contribution to it, is not a planetary emergency which should bother us.
I am not a climatologist, but the IPCC and its leading spokespersons are not climatologists either. I am content to be a consumer of climatology and its related scientific disciplines. In this respect, I am located – in the economic jargon – on the demand side of climatology, not on the supply side.
There are many distinguished scientists here, and some of them are on the other side. I have no intention to break into their fields of study. By expressing my doubts about a simple causal relationship between human CO2 emissions and climate, I do not have the slightest ambition to support one or another competing scientific hypothesis concerning the factors leading to global warming (or eventually cooling).
Nevertheless, my reading both of the available data and of conflicting scientific arguments and theories allows me to argue that it is not global warming caused by human activity that is threatening us.
My views about this issue have been expressed in a number of speeches and articles in the last couple of years all over the world. The book “Blue Planet in Green Shackles” has already been published in 18 languages, last month even in Indonesian. The subtitle of the book asks, “What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?” The real problem is not climate or global warming, but the Global Warming Doctrine and its consequences. They may eventually bring us close to a real planetary emergency. Absolutely unnecessarily, without any connection with global temperature.
This doctrine, as a set of beliefs, is an ideology, if not a religion. It lives independently on the science of climatology. Its disputes are not about temperature, but are part of the “conflict of ideologies”. Temperature is used and misused in these disputes. The politicians, the media and the public – misled by the very aggressive propaganda produced by the adherents of the global warming doctrine – do not see this. It is our task to help them to distinguish between what is science and what is ideology.
Believers in the global warming doctrine have not yet presented its authoritative text, its manifesto. One of the reasons is that no one wants to be explicitly connected with it. Another is that to put such a text together would be difficult because this doctrine is not a monolithic concept which can be easily summarized. Its subject matter does not belong to any single science. It presents itself as a flexible, rather inconsistent, loosely connected cascade of arguments, which is why it has quite successfully escaped the scrutiny of science. It comfortably dwells in the easy and self protecting world of false interdisciplinarity which is really a nondisciplinarity, it is an absence of discipline.
While this Federation doesn’t have a mega-PR team nor millions of dollars to spend on that PR it does have a member roll of 10,000 scientists from all over the world. The founder of this Federation is Professor Antonino Zichichi. He discovered a form of anti-matter 40 years before that billion dollar collider did and is the most famous Italian scientist since Galileo.
Christopher Monckton writes that Zichichi is angry. Why you ask?
Angry because he, like me, was brought up in the Classical tradition, which insists that the duty of every “seeker after truth” (Al-Haytham’s beautiful phrase for the scientist) is to be logical and rational. He founded the Federation at the height of the Cold War to remind scientists of their moral responsibility to use their craft for good, not for ill, and of their intellectual obligation to adhere rigorously to the scientific method.
Nino is furious at the politicization of climate science. Science these days is a monopsony. There is only one paying customer: the State. Scientists increasingly produce the results their political paymasters want rather than seeking after truth.
Nowhere is the buying of desired results by governments clearer than in Nick Stern’s now-discredited report of 2006 on climate economics. The U.N.’s absurd climate panel had already at least tripled the true (and harmless) rate of warming to be expected from our adding CO2 to the air. Stern, to please his socialist paymasters, tripled it again without the slightest justification. Then he divided by 10 the true cost of making global warming go away and multiplied by 10 the true cost of not acting to Save The Planet (memo to Old Nick: The planet was triumphantly saved 2,000 years ago and doesn’t need saving again).
Tony Blair, the shifty socialist prime minister of the day, was so delighted with this nonsense that he gave Stern a peerage and installed him as head of the Grantham Institute, a lavishly funded propaganda institution promoting fear of climatic Armageddon and hatred of the West.
Using Old Nick’s report as a pretext, Blair (with the near-unanimous support of all parties, including Call-Me-Dave Cameron’s Not-The-Conservative-Party) introduced the biggest tax increase in human history. With only three votes against, the Climate Change and National Economic Hara-Kiri Act was passed on the very night when the first October snow for 74 years was falling outside in Parliament Square.
And using Australia’s new carbon dioxide tax as a case study Christopher Monckton demonstrated that it would cost the world “$6 quadrillion to prevent the 6 degrees Fahrenheit of predicted “global warming” that will not happen anyway.”
6 quadrillion dollars!
And what does our President think of that?
Obama has an ambitious second-term agenda, which, at least in broad ways, his campaign is beginning to highlight. The President has said that the most important policy he could address in his second term is climate change, one of the few issues that he thinks could fundamentally improve the world decades from now.
Not our economy that is in shambles but climate change!
Larry Bell writing at Forbes (read the whole thing):
Global temperatures have been rising since before the Industrial Revolution could have had any real influence…from the time the Little Ice Age ended in the mid-19th century…and according to NASA-GISS, about 0.8°C (1.5°F) since 1880. About half of all estimated warming since 1900 occurred before the mid-1940s, despite continuously rising CO2 levels since that time.
Yes, let’s realize that climate change is very real, dating back to always. It actually began to occur long before humans invented agriculture, smoke stacks, and gasoline-fueled internal combustion engines. In fact, a recent study conducted by German researchers using tree ring data reveals that 2,000 years ago Romans wore cool togas with good reason. Summer temperatures between 21 to 50 AD were about 1 degree Celsius warmer than now, and they were just as warm during the Medieval period about 1,000 years later.
Lead author Professor Jan Esper of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz said: “We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low.” He notes that while 1 degree Celsius may not seem significant, “their findings are significant with respect to climate policy, as they will influence the way climate changes are seen in context of historical warm periods.”
The study documented temperatures dating back to 138 BC, indicating that the world has been on a “long-term cooling trend” punctuated with a couple of warm spells for two millennia until another warming occurred during the twentieth century. In general, there was a slow cooling of 0.6 degrees Celsius over the earlier period.
As for those “worst time ever” extreme weather conditions that Eugene Robinson referred to, remember that as recently as 1,000 years ago Icelandic Vikings were raising livestock in grasslands on Greenland’s southwestern coast. Then, around 1200, temperatures began to drop, and Norse settlements were abandoned by about 1350. Atlantic pack ice began to grow around 1250, and shortened growing seasons and unreliable weather patterns, including torrential rains in Northern Europe led to the “Great Famine” of 1315-1317.
Temperatures dropped dramatically again in the middle of the 16th century, and although there were notable year-to-year fluctuations, the coldest regime since the last true Ice Age (that so-called “Little Ice Age”) dominated the next hundred and fifty years or more. Food shortages killed millions in Europe between 1690 and 1700, followed by more famines in 1725 and 1816. The end of this time witnessed brutal winter temperatures suffered by Washington’s troops at Valley Forge in 1776, and Napoleon’s bitterly cold retreat from Russia in 1812.
Although temperatures and weather conditions have been generally mild over about the past 150 years, we should remember that significant fluctuations are normal. In fact, the past century has witnessed at most, two (and very possibly only one) periods of warming. The first definite warming period occurred between 1900 and 1945. Since CO2 levels were relatively low then compared with now, and didn’t change much, they couldn’t have been the cause before 1950. Since this apparently resulted from natural influences, then why is more recent warming being attributed to increased atmospheric CO2 emissions?
The climate is changing, always has, always will. Humans are insignificant to this process and spending 6 quadrillion dollars to try and prevent 6 degrees of warming is insane, as is electing a man who thinks that climate change is one of the most important goals of his administration.
Exit quote from one of those IPCC “experts”:
“If we don’t do anything, the risk of a heatwave occurring will be 10 times higher by 2100 compared with the start of the century”
Sigh….
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