Is Al Gore sane?

That, at least, is what Czech Republic President, Vaclav Klaus, wonders in a recent interview with Hospodářské noviny (Economic News), a Czech daily newspaper. (The link is to the English translation of the original interview.) In response to the question, "Don't you believe that we're ruining our planet", Mr. Klaus responded:

Perhaps only Mr Al Gore may be saying something along these lines: a sane person hardly. I don't see any ruining of the planet, I have never seen it, and I don't think that a reasonable and serious person could say that he has. ... [W]e know that there exists a huge correlation between the care we give to the environment on one side and the wealth and technological prowess on the other side. It's clear that the poorer the society is, the more brutally it behaves with respect to Nature, and vice versa.

It's also true that there exist social systems that are damaging Nature - by eliminating private ownership and similar things - much more than the freer societies. These tendencies become important in the long run. They unambiguously imply that today, on February 8th, 2007, Nature is protected uncomparably more than on February 8th ten years ago or fifty years ago or one hundred years ago.

A bit earlier in the interview the reporter asked, "How do you explain that there is no other comparably senior statesman in Europe who would advocate this viewpoint? No one else has such strong opinions..." (emphasis mine):

My opinions about this issue simply are strong. Other top-level politicians do not express their global warming doubts because a whip of political correctness strangles their voice.

This was followed up by, "But you're not a climate scientist. Do you have a sufficient knowledge and enough information?"

Environmentalism as a metaphysical ideology and as a worldview has absolutely nothing to do with natural sciences or with the climate. Sadly, it has nothing to do with social sciences either. Still, it is becoming fashionable and this fact scares me. The second part of the sentence should be: we also have lots of reports, studies, and books of climatologists whose conclusions are diametrally opposite.

Indeed, I never measure the thickness of ice in Antarctica. I really don't know how to do it, I don't plan to learn it, and I don't pretend to be an expert in such measurements. However, as a scientifically oriented person, I know how to read science reports about these questions, for example about ice in Antarctica. I don't have to be a climate scientist myself to read them. And inside the papers I have read, the conclusions we may see in the media simply don't appear.

Environmentalism and green ideology is something very different from climate science. Various findings and screams of scientists are abused by this ideology.

My kind of guy!

On our side of the Atlantic we have people like Senators Olympia Snowe and Jay Rockefeller demanding that oil companies stop funding research that questions the received gospel of anthro-centric global warming.

Those that rail against anthro-centric global warming skeptics have transmogrified the debate into a single point; i. e., that the skeptics deny that any warming has occured. This is simply not the case. The skeptics can read the temperature reports as well as anyone. The skeptics don't question whether any warming has occured – clearly it has – but whether or not it is due primarily to human causes.