By Václav Klaus, Czech ex-president, published in "The Week" (Týden) in CZ



For a long enough time, the environmental activists have been searching for a sufficiently strong and empirically unfalsifiable theme that could help them to seriously influence the world's events. Their first efforts were backed by the Malthusian doctrine about the unsustainable population growth that was supposed to exceed our planet's ability to feed the mankind. Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book "The Population Bomb" has predicted mass famines in Europe and America to occur within 20 years. As all of us know, nothing like that has ever taken place (I must mention that this utopian is employed as an aide of Obama's even today).









Then another idea came – from the same circles – and it was warning us against the depletion of resources. They were claiming that the oil, coal, and natural gas would get exhausted. Once again, the prediction was said to be realized within 20 years. We were reminding them that what may be called a "resource" depends on the human skills and the degree of the technological development which had no limits. Our teaching efforts were futile. Twenty years later, the verified reserves of resources turned out to be far higher than before; these days, for example, we are almost literally drowning in crude oil. And countries are stopping their coal mining.









The third threat that came afterwards was the pollution of the environment. We were stressing that the degree of pollution depends on the wealth of the society and the quality of its economic system. Poor countries are intensely contaminating the water, the air, and the forests; the communist countries that have eliminated private ownership were damaging the whole environment because no relevant person cared about this problem. In our country, we saw enormous improvements of the environment after the fall of communism. All of us know it, only the extremists among the environmental activists don't want to see this fact. The quality of the environment monotonically increases with the wealth of the human society. Does anyone want to deny it?



Later, the warnings got more specific when we were warned about the ozone hole. The problem turned out to be temporary but the environmentalists took credit for having solved the problem by the "Montreal Protocol" even though no trustworthy evidence in favor of the effectiveness of that policy has emerged.



The environmental alarmists have understood that they needed to change their tactics. They have understood – much like all the religions that came before them – that they shouldn't promise anything "in this world". They were looking for something that can't be disproven in a lifetime or in an imaginable future. Only such a theme could give them a reasonable chance that their fraud wouldn't be unmasked in their lifetimes. (This fraud is mercilessly presented in the new documentary "Climate Hustle" shot by the Heartland Institute in Chicago that will be premiered in Paris on December 7th.)



The climate is constantly changing in time, it is changing at the long historical time scales, and we know no explanations for some of its oscillations around the longer-term trends. There exist some hypotheses that explain the long-term swings rather satisfactorily but they fail to explain the medium-term and short-term behavior. In the human life, we think about years when we talk about short-term and medium-term perspectives. The climate is changing at longer timescales of centuries or millenniums. And this difference between the human and terrestrial time scales is the main weapon abused by the climate alarmists. Naive people may be fooled by such tricks but it's sad that Obama, Hollande, Merkel, and (Czech socialist PM) Sobotka have bought into this story, too. It proves that they don't have what it takes to lead their nations.



We have seen enough scams within the global warming movement. They included a statistical trick to report the temperatures as well as the claims that the climate science has understood this issue well. Even in Czechia, numerous books, studies, and articles pointing out these untruths and tricks have been published. Everyone who is interested in the topic or who wants to make public pronouncements about the issue may easily find them. Even the author of this text has published the book "Blue Planet in Green Shackles" as early as in 2007. The subtitle was: "What Is Endangered: Climate Or Freedom?"



My answer was – and it's still true now, eight years later – that the climate is alright but it is the human freedom that is threatened. It is threatened by those people who want to return us to an unfree society directed from the top, a society dominated by the manipulation of the people, mandatory uniformity of their thinking, and dictates. Several days ago, a man from Germany's Ingolstadt wrote me that he was terrified by a new "faschistischer Meinungsdiktatur" (a fascist opinion dictatorship) that he seems to see around himself and that seems to return us towards our troubled past.



The world leaders' hallucinations in Paris are going beyond the thresholds we were used to in the past. A new agreement is being delineated that would decelerate the economic growth in the whole world and reduce the human freedom, too. This project is nonsensical. We should be worried about other threats than the global warming. The most serious one is the risk of a collapse of Europe as we knew it by the migrant invasion. At the beginning of the climate conference, French president Hollande stated that the war on terror and the fight against climate change were inseparably connected. This proposition is really a strong cup of tea. Let's not allow them to fool us or steal our independent reasoning.



Václav Klaus, December 7th, 2015