Czech leader joins meeting of climate change challengers

It is billed as the largest ever gathering of climate change challengers, a convention that kicked off last night with a title suggesting global warming is a thing of the past, and a guest list that includes a sitting European president.

Entitled Global Warming: Was It Ever Really a Crisis? and featuring some of the most prominent skeptics in the climate change debate, this week's conference in New York sets out to escalate its confrontation with the political establishment, the majority of which is aggressively promoting the view that humans are the principal cause of climate change.

Conference organisers were celebrating something of a coup in securing as a keynote speaker the Czech president, Václav Klaus, at a time when his country holds the rotating presidency of the EU. Klaus, a Eurosceptic, believes that efforts to protect the world from the impact of climate change are an assault on freedom.

"The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy, and prosperity, at the end of the 20th and at the beginning of the 21st century, is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism,"

Klaus will say, according to prepared remarks provided by the organisers. He adds:

"Environmentalism and the global alarmism are challenging our freedom."

This week's gathering brings together some of the more vocal critics of the scientific consensus, which maintains that climate change has been caused by human activity and that rising temperatures are now so dangerous to people's existence as to warrant urgent action... [snip]

A poll by the Pew Research Centre this year showed that climate change ranked last among topics of public concern to Americans; only 30% put global warming as their top priority, far down the scale from the economy, jobs, terrorism, moral decline, and even trade policy...

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