Being president of the Czech Republic is more like being England's monarch than the president of the United States. While the Czech president has veto power over certain types of legislation, his role is supposed to be mostly ceremonial.
But Vaclav Klaus — who was re-elected last month after being chosen by the Czech Parliament as head of state in 2003 — has not been content to confine himself to ribbon cuttings and state dinners.
Czech President Václav Klaus was one of the speakers at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, and his message was unequivocal. It is not about climatology. It is about freedom.
“Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will, nevertheless, be identical – the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice the man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality.”
While most other politicians have gotten on the self-sacrifice-at-the-green-altar bandwagon, blinding themselves to the blood that is dripping from that altar, Václav Klaus has the intellectual decency to be Thomas Stockman of his peers. He was a dissident during the communist era, and now he is a dissident among international state leaders.
His recent portrait in the Wall Street Journal portrays several issues, where he chooses to stay off the bandwagons that other European politicians has gotten on, that includes climate change, Russia, and the Kosovo independence. It takes courage to be a lone voice of reason in a world of group think.
Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch
Mark Newgent, who blogs regularly at Red Maryland and has written extensively on Maryland's climate change commission and the work of the Center for Climate Strategies there, writes in the Baltimore Examiner about the phony scientific consensus of the IPCC panel that alarmists incessantly invoke when defending their indefensible panic attacks:
What goes unmentioned is the fact that the IPCC is a political body. Skeptics are critical of the IPCC because alarmists — even though they masquerade their political motivations in sanctimonious moral language — tout this nonexistent consensus in their patently political quest for massive government interventions into the economy and private life.
Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch
Amazing — a new study released in the journal Science claims that everything we always understood about the age of the Grand Canyon was wrong. Turns out that rather than being 5 or 6 million years old, the new report says it is more like 17 million years old:
Not so fast, said Joel Pederson, a geomorphologist at Utah State University who has spent his career studying the Grand Canyon. He said the estimated age of 5 million to 6 million years is based on abundant evidence amassed by scientists over many decades. Seventeen million is impossible, he said, because there is no evidence of a large quantity of sediment flowing out of a canyon before 6 million years ago.
"They clearly have not taken the time to be rigorous and actually understand the regional geography," Pederson said.
Sound familiar? Won't be long before the paradigm-changing geologists are called deniers and banished from any further publication in established science journals. Let the mock and ridicule begin!
Miklós Zágoni isn't just a physicist and environmental researcher. He is also a global warming activist and Hungary's most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol. Or was.
That was until he learned the details of a new theory of the greenhouse effect, one that not only gave far more accurate climate predictions here on Earth, but Mars too.
Frederick Seitz, 96, the former president of the National Academy of Sciences who was an outspoken skeptic of global warming, died March 2 at the Mary Manning Walsh nursing home in New York City. No cause of death was reported.
Only about one in three Alberta earth scientists and engineers believe the culprit behind climate change has been identified, a new poll reported today.
The expert jury is divided, with 26 per cent attributing global warming to human activity like burning fossil fuels and 27 per cent blaming other causes such as volcanoes, sunspots, earth crust movements and natural evolution of the planet.
A 99-per-cent majority believes the climate is changing. But 45 per cent blame both human and natural influences, and 68 per cent disagree with the popular statement that "the debate on the scientific causes of recent climate change is settled."
It turns out that “Global warming not always to blame for extreme winters.”
It’s a good thing we spend so much more on climate-related research than, say, AIDS, or the world would go without such wisdom.
Gordon Brown warned yesterday that energy companies could still face a windfall tax unless they offered a much bigger rebate for the poor and pensioners facing big rises in fuel bills.
The prime minister was being questioned in the Commons by David Marshall, Labour MP for Glasgow East, a week before the budget as pressure grows from MPs for action against energy firms. The companies have hit back by warning that a windfall tax could affect their commitment to investment in renewable energy.
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