(CHICAGO, September 25, 2007) — Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus challenged the United Nations to carefully and seriously analyze its global warming initiatives, saying the cost of any proposed global warming solutions should not be greater than their benefits.
Klaus argued that, with the current state of climate change, global warming cannot be considered “real, big, imminent, and man-made.” The Czech President said it is premature to call climate change a “crisis” and blame it on man. He further challenged the U.N. to provide for a competing Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to eliminate the current one-sided, alarmist perspective on the debate and corresponding political activism. Klaus petitioned for “an efficient and rational” debate.
Supporting his claim that global warming is not a crisis, Klaus stated, “Contrary to artificially created worldwide perception, the increase in global temperatures has been–in the last years, decades, and centuries–very small by historical comparison, and practically negligible in its actual impact upon human beings and their activities.”
Klaus continued, “The hypothetical threat connected with future global warming depends exclusively upon forecasts, not upon past experience. These speculative forecasts are, however, based on relatively short time series of relevant variables and on forecasting models that have not been found reliable when attempting to explain past developments.”
In response to draconian global warming regulatory proposals, Klaus concluded, “Rational response depends–as always–on the size and probability of the risk and on the magnitude of the costs of its avoidance. As a responsible politician, as an economist, as an author of a book about the economics of climate change, with all available data and arguments in mind, I have to conclude that the risk is too small, the costs of eliminating it too high.”
The complete text of Klaus’s presentation is available online at http://www.globalwarmingheartland.org/article.cfm?artId=22021
The audio/video of Klaus’s 7:45 minute speech, in RealPlayer format, is available here: Audio/Video (RealPlayer, 7:45 min.)
