PRESIDENT CZECHS OUT OF CLIMATE CONSENSUS

29-09-2007

George Bush has shown signs that he's (ahem) thawing on climate change, announcing yesterday that leading nations ought to set targets for cutting greenhouse emissions. Yet at the UN the other day, the Czech president boldly challenged conventional wisdom. This report by Lost In Kate Winslet.

Václav Klaus spoke on Monday (24th September) at the United Nations. Nothing particularly special in that you might think considering he is the current President of the Czech Republic. What made Klaus stand out from the crowd was his contribution to the debate being held on climate change.

The UN was holding what it calls a high-level event that went by the title of The Future in our Hands: Addressing the Leadership Challenge of Climate Change

This event was the usual mix of platitudes and gestures which comes from politicians when discussing climate change. Klaus' speech was the one exception which prompted the journal Nature to call him a renegade.

Considering the origin of the word renegades comes from the Middle Ages to describe those who lost their belief in Christianity, it fits with the current pseudo-religious approach to this subject from journals such as Nature or Science.

So what did Klaus say in New York? Well he made the observations that the increase in global temperatures has been - in the last years, decades and centuries - very small in historical comparisons and practically negligible in its actual impact upon human beings and their activities and that the hypothetical threat connected with future global warming depends exclusively upon very speculative forecasts, not upon undeniable past experience and its eventual trends and tendencies.

Klaus went on to argue that the causes of the 20th Century warming is still an area of contested scientific debate and to prematurely proclaim the victory of one group over another would be a tragic mistake and I am afraid we are making it and that rational behaviour depends - as always - on the size and probability of the risk and on the magnitude of the costs of its avoidance.

He concluded his assessment of the current debate surrounding climate change and political responses to that threat by stating that the risk is too small, the costs of eliminating it too high and the application of a fundamentalistically interpreted "precautionary principle" a wrong strategy.

Unfortunately for Václav Klaus and the rest of us is that rationalism in politicians is in short supply in the 21st Century. Especially when it comes to dealing with science.

Opportunism however remains abundant. For example, the recent tax on air travellers by the former Chancellor Gordon Brown had nothing to do with any concerns with climate change. The effect of the tax was inelastic in terms of dampening demand and the revenue helped with a shortfall between tax revenues and government expenditure. That boats are a greater producer of global CO2 emissions than aeroplanes seems to have escaped the attention of the Treasury.

I have nothing but praise for Václav Klaus for refusing to follow the herd. His speech however was ignored by the mainstream media. Its somewhat of a shame that there is no rational debate about this subject. Instead there is a dogmatic attachment to carbon reduction which simply means economic reduction of people's standards of living.

It is misanthropic behaviour and not one I subscribe to as these policies will ensure that the poor remain poor and therefore subject billions of humans to continue poverty while the Western nations continue to enjoy a higher standard of living.