Václav Klaus | klaus

Many thanks for the invitation to attend your conference and to speak here. I appreciate that a mere politician, a former economist, has been invited to address this well-known gathering of highly respected scientists.  If I understand it correctly, this year´s seminar is devoted to the discussion of the role of science and of “planetary emergencies”.

To the first topic, I want to say very clearly that I don´t see a special role for science which would be different from doing science. I have, of course, in mind “normal science”, not a “post-normal science” whose ambitions are very often connected with political activism. The role of scientists is not in speculating on the probabilities of events that cannot be directly measured and tested, nor in promoting a pseudo-scientific “precautionary principle”, nor in engaging in activities which are the proper function not of scientists but of risk managers.

To the second topic, I have to say that as a conservatively-minded person, I am unaware of any forthcoming “planetary emergency”, with the exception of those potential situations which would be the consequences of human failures – of human fanaticism, of false pride, and of lack of modesty. But these are problems of political systems and of ideologies.

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”[1] 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.[2] 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.

The global warming doctrine believers 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 non-disciplinarity, it is an absence of discipline.

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