On March 30-31 there will be another climate conference, this time in Washington, D.C. After this conference, four panels of experts are supposed to release consensus reports in late 2009. Then, the Committee on America’s Climate Choices will issue a final report in 2010 that will integrate the findings and recommendations from the four panel reports.

My question is: how much money is put into these conferences, congresses, summits, meetings and seminars? Kyoto, Bali, Washington, Copenhagen? And what is the result? Evidently, millions of dollars are spent on conference facilities, speakers’ fees, travel etc etc. For what good? What have we accomplished so far? And what do we hope to accomplish in the future?

European cap-and-trade is a miserable example of how climate politics don’t work. Now, it may be time for the US to discover the beauties of carbon trading.

I am surprised that, while climate alarmists always call for the precautionary principle when speaking of the dire consequences of CO2-emissions, no one even mentions it when talking about climate politics.

You have probably heard of Mark Lynas, 35 years of age, alarmist writer and environmental activist focused on climate change. In today’s Guardian he serves us a scary dish - forget about the 2 degree C global warming. It’s going to be much, much worse.

According to Lynas, the former chairman of the IPCC, Bob Watson, warns us to prepare for 4C global warming. To avoid that, we must make drastic CO2 cuts now. Bob was kicked out of the IPCC by the Bush administration for being speaking too loudly about the global warming threat, Lynas says. Nevertheless, he has continued his quest for a carbon-free world. After leaving the IPCC, he chaired the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, a UN study looking at the sad future of our planet’s natrual systems. So he, if anybody, should know.

Lynas and Watson are very skeptic about the future of humanity.

“Yes, we should certainly prepare for the worst as far as possible – with flood defences, drought-resistant crops and strategies to ameliorate the loss of wildlife, at the very least – but a look at the likely impact of a four-degrees temperature rise suggests that such a dramatic change would probably stretch society’s capacity for adaptation to the limit, not to mention having a disastrous effect on the natural ecosystems that support humanity as a whole.

(…) The planet would be in the throes of a mass extinction of natural life approaching in magnitude that at the end of the Cretaceous period, 65m years ago, when more than half of global biodiversity was wiped out.”

Rivers will run dry, rainforests will collapse and burn, ferocious heatwaves will kill millions. We are heading for a total meltdown of life as we know it. The solution? STOP BURNING ALL FOSSIL FUELS NOW! Sure, there are no viable alternatives but Mark Lynas would rather see the world return to medieval living conditions than allow for the mercury to rise.

Do not miss to read the comments. Some of them are quite funny.

According to a recent British poll, more than one third of the Brits believe the 9/11 to be staged by the US government. Almost as many think that Apollo’s moon landing was shot right here on Earth. Obviously, we all prone to conspiracy thinking.

Today, the term “conspiration” has been widely adopted in the climate debate. The proponents of the AGW-theory claim that climate skepticism is directed and produced by conservative think tanks in cooperation with the oil business. Climate skeptics, on the other hand, argue that AGW may very well be the biggest scam ever pulled on the human race.

Who is right, if anybody? Who conspires against whom and for what purpose? Which side has the most to gain?

How come global warming has become so overexposed in media? Why is climate change to blame for almost everything? Is CO2 the perfect means to curtail technical and economic development? Is climate change just one of many scares presented to us humans over the past hundred years? Or is it a real threat, stubbornly denied by some shadowy interest groups?

What do you think?

Czech President Vaclav Klaus said he is ready to debate Al Gore about global warming. He has just presented the English version of his new book, “Blue Planet in Green Shackles - What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?” that argues environmentalism poses a threat to basic human freedoms.

“I many times tried to talk to have a public exchange of views with him, and he’s not too much willing to make such a conversation,” Klaus said. “So I’m ready to do it.”

Vaclav Klaus has long opposed climate alarmism, comparing it to the decades of communist rule he experienced growing up in Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia.

“In the past, it was in the name of the Marxists or of the proletariat - this time, in the name of the planet.”

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Homo sapiens. A fly’s faeces in the vast of the universe? Or a major player - powerful enough to smash and trash the planet we live on? Do we underestimate our influence? Or do we think too highly of ourselves?

In the current climate debate humans are often portrayed as greedy villains who proliferate, exploit and devastate. In order to save the Earth and thereby ourselves from destruction we must turn away from the sin of burning fossil fuels and adopt an environmentally sustainable lifestyle. The latter is defined as anything from refraining from flying to embracing the humble ways of the Amish. Is it fair?

Six and a half billion human beings are accused of jointly polluting the atmosphere to a catastrophic extent. Slowly but surely, we will boil ourselves, melt the ice caps, exterminate all species and put an end to all life on Earth. Are we really that powerful? Or are we just a bunch of megalomaniacs?

When our grandparents were in school it was thought that the universe was very small, perhaps only 5,000 light years across. 500 years ago it was thought that space was only a little bit bigger than the Earth. In modern times, with the power of technology, we are finally starting to grasp the immense size of the universe, and it is much bigger than anyone could have ever imagined. What do we know about all the forces that rule the universe? What do we know about all the mechanisms ruling the climatic system?

The Earth is around 4.5 billion years old and there have been at least four major ice ages in its past. It has withstood asteroids, reverses in polarity and many other truly catastrophic events. The modern form of Homo sapiens first appeared about 100,000 years ago and the Industrial Revolution started in England around 1733 with the first cotton mill. Supporters of AGW claim that in just about 300 years man has managed to strike a deathblow to the Earth’s fragile climate. Reversing the course of things will require total abstinence from fossil fuels.

I don’t have all the facts. Neither do I have all the answers. However, I dare to believe that blaming man for altering the climate and destroying the planet is giving ourselves way too much credit.

If you follow the climate debate you have probably noticed a slight change. What was formerly referred to as “global warming” is now called “climate change”. Perhaps to safeguard the case against a sudden 180-degree swing. This year’s record cold winter has paralyzed many parts of the world despite the ever-growing amount of greenhouse gases billowing out from India and China.

Even though there is some uneasiness among the alarmists, they can’t just put down arms and acknowledge defeat. Too much money has already been invested. Too many jobs and reputations are on the line. So they add some wrinkles to the story and hope nobody will react. It’s like the story about the boiling frog. By making small gradual adjustments the alarmists hope change will be imperceptible.

Take for example John Tierney in The New York Times. It looks like someone at the NYT has finally caught on to the hoax but won’t admit it. So instead they try to gently slip in the truth.

A year ago, British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the buildup of greenhouse gases would help make 2007 the hottest year on record. At year’s end, even though the British scientists reported the global temperature average was not a new record — it was actually lower than any year since 2001 — the BBC confidently proclaimed, “2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend.”

When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored. A large part of Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most coverage of that continent has focused on one small part that has warmed.

Slow warming doesn’t make for memorable images on television or in people’s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead.

All the faithful are of course a little worried. How can this super-cold winter happen? What is wrong with the climate change? Around the world, the modeling teams are sweating to adjust their calculations. At the same time other scientists, such as Ferenc Miskolczi, discover that “greenhouse warming” may be mathematically impossible. In short, the warming models assume that the atmosphere is infinitely thick. If on the other hand, you assume the atmosphere is about 100 km thick (about 65 miles) - which has the big advantage of being true - the greenhouse effect disappears! Oops, no more global warming.

What happens once this farce is finally exposed? Whose heads will roll?