The chilling costs of climate catastrophism.

SOMETIME AFTER the Soviet Army had crushed the Dubcek regime in Prague in 1968, our great Cold War warrior, Frank Knopfelmacher, was described by his opponents in condescending and patronising tones as a "threat expert". Vietnam had fallen and the USA was in disarray, the Soviet empire was marching from success to success, and Soviet apologists in Australia were increasingly confident about the future. Knopfelmacher embraced the term with enthusiasm. "Yes," he replied, "I am indeed a threat expert," and went on to recount the story of his escape from Czechoslovakia as a teenager just before the Nazi takeover in 1938; and then how, having returned to Czechoslovakia after the war, he was forced to use the proceeds from selling his family's property (he was the only survivor) to bribe his way out after the communist takeover in 1948. He was, through firsthand experience, a highly qualified threat expert.

In recent years another Czech threat expert has been sounding the trumpet for freedom. Vaclav Klaus was born in Prague in 1941 and became an outstanding student in economics, graduating from the University of Economics in Prague in 1963. He was allowed to study abroad in Italy in 1966 and in the USA in 1969, where he came under the influence of Milton Friedman. In 1968 he was awarded his PhD from the Institute of Economics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. From 1970 until 1987 he was kept under wraps in the State Bank of Czechoslovakia, but after the successful uprising of November 1989 he was appointed Federal Minister of Finance, and he became Prime Minister in June 1992. In February 2003, and again in February 2008, he was elected President of the Czech Republic.

The presidency is a non-executive role and so Vaclav Klaus has been able to immerse himself in the global warming debate. He has written a book entitled Blue, Not Green Planet, published in Czech last year and due out in English translation (as Blue Planet in Green Shackles) in the USA this May. He has spoken regularly on the issue at home and abroad. In February 2007 he was interviewed by a Prague journalist who took him to task for his refusal to accept the global warming thesis now hegemonial throughout Europe. Klaus was very blunt: "Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so."

His constant theme is the threat which the "warmists", as he describes them, pose to freedom. Here is a characteristic Klausian description of this threat:

 
      Global warming hysteria has become 
   a prime example of the truth-versus-propaganda 
   problem. It requires courage to oppose the 
   "established" truth, although a lot of people--including 
   top-class scientists--see the issue of 
   climate Change entirely differently. They protest 
   against the arrogance of those who advocate the 
   global warming hypothesis and relate it to human 
   activities. 
 
      As someone who lived under communism for 
   most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the 
   biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market 
   economy and prosperity now in ambitious 
   environmentalism, not in communism. This 
   ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous 
   evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now 
   global) planning. 

In the paper President Klaus gave at the Heartland Institute conference held in New York in March, attended by more than 500 highly qualified people in climate science, economics and public policy, he concluded with these comments:

 
   As a politician who personally experienced 
   communist central planning of all kinds of human 
   activities, I feel obliged to bring back the already 
   almost forgotten arguments used in the famous 
   plan-versus-market debate in the 1930s in economic 
   theory (between Mises and Hayek on the one side 
   and Lange and Lerner on the other); the arguments 
   we had been using for decades until the moment of 
   the fall of communism. The innocence with which 
   climate alarmists and their fellow travellers in 
   politics and media now present and justify their 
   ambitions to mastermind human society belongs to 
   the same fatal conceit. To my great despair, this is 
   not sufficiently challenged, neither in the field of 
   social sciences, nor in the field of climatology. The 
   social sciences, especially, are suspiciously silent. 
 
      The climate alarmists believe in their own 
   omnipotency; in knowing better than millions of 
   rationally behaving men and women what is fight 
   or wrong. They believe in their own ability to 
   assemble all relevant data into their Central Climate 
   Change Regulatory Office equipped with huge 
   supercomputers, and in the possibility of giving 
   adequate instructions to hundreds of millions of 
   individuals and institutions and in the non-existence 
   of an incentive problem (and the resulting 
   compliance or non-compliance of those who are 
   supposed to follow these instructions). 
 
      We have to restart the discussion about the very 
   nature of government and about the relationship 
   between the individual and society. Now it 
   concerns the whole of mankind, not just the citizens 
   of one particular country. To discuss this means to 
   look at the canonically structured theoretical 
   discussion about socialism (or communism), and to 
   learn the uncompromising lesson from the 
   inevitable collapse of communism eighteen years 
   ago. It is not about climatology. It is about freedom.