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Address to World Climate Declaration Signatories: Global Warming Ideology, CLINTEL’s Contribution to the International Debate

English Pages, 19. 1. 2026

Introduction

Clintel, through its sceptical view on the issue of man-made climate change, has succeeded, in its first six years of existence, in reaching a large audience all over the world. It has also established a global network of more than 2000 scientists and experts. This important achievement was made by Clintel’s founder and first President, Prof. Berkhout, together with its Managing Director, Marcel Crok, and many other collaborators. We all express our gratitude to them.

By selecting me as the new President of Clintel in December 2025, the organization entered its second stage. I regard it as an extremely challenging task to guarantee Clintel’s continuation and further development in a positive way.

Our first era helped some of us to get rid of the feeling that we were – as individuals – somehow strange, weird, negative, protesting, contrarian, disrespectful and unwilling to accept what was – authoritatively – presented as the majority view. Thanks to the existence of Clintel, we have found like-minded friends and colleagues in many countries around the world. We feel obliged to make use of this exceptional network of free-thinking people. 

We are no negativists. We are productively and rationally thinking sceptics. And because of our long experience in this field, because of our past intellectual achievements (proved by university degrees, domestic and international awards, published articles and books, and by the successful education of thousands of students) we are convinced that we are right, that we have something to offer, that we are able to make useful and meaningful contributions to the debate about so-called climate change, which we consider to be the fundamental issue of our era.

 Our objective is to contribute answers to some elementary but fundamental questions:

1. Are we responsible for the current increase in average global temperatures (if that concept has scientific meaning and is worth studying)? 

2.  Is the statistically-measured temperature increase of recent decades proof of a long-term trend, and does it really endanger the future of mankind? 

3.  If the two hypotheses underlying questions 1 and 2 are valid and justified, is there anything that can be done about it, and will any climate action bring more benefits than costs?           

Clintel’s main positions

Clintel has formulated its answers to these questions in many publications, and especially in its initial Declaration in 2019; in its May 2023 study The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC; and in the December 2025 farewell address of our distinguished first President, Professor Guus Berkhout. 

In its Declaration, Clintel stressed that “climate science has degenerated into a discussion based on beliefs, not on sound, self-critical science”. We keep this as our starting point. The statement that “there is no climate emergency” resonated all over the world. It remains as relevant today as it was six years ago. 

The new Czech Minister of the Environment, Petr Macinka, who had been my collaborator for many years, declared upon entering office in December 2025 that, since there is no climate emergency, “I dissolve the section of the Ministry called ‘Climate Protection’.” 

In a letter to me in September 2025, Prof. Berkhout stressed that “climate change is neither a crisis nor an emergency”. He also drew attention to the irreplaceable role of background science or sciences, as opposed to climate modelling. As a former econometrician, I came to the conclusion that climate models are very inadequate and represent no alternative to serious climate science. The widely used parameterizations (sometimes called calibration) in these models is a return to a prescientific way of thinking. 

I could extensively quote from the study The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC, but we all have it on our desks. The critique of the IPCC expressed therein is more than justified. IPCC acts as a knowledge monopoly, which tries to convince us that CO₂ is the predominant regulator of the planetary temperature. This implies that the IPCC and its adherents are excluding or ignoring other crucial factors influencing the climate. Their approach is very unscientific. 

I myself – an economist and econometrician who became a politician at the moment of the fall of Communism in my country, then Czechoslovakia, in November 1989 – believe in the strength and productiveness of economic theory in explaining human behaviour and in offering important guidance on how to organize an economic system and on how to formulate a sound economic policy. 

I believe in the irreplaceable significance of the free market as well as in the fundamental role of prices in reflecting the crucial concept of scarcity in rational human decision-making. I am in favour of analysing the consequences of rationality-defying economic behaviour on the part of politicians who want to mastermind reality according to their plans and prejudices. I am convinced that the science of economics has a significant role to play in helping us to analyse green policies and their disastrous consequences.

The economic way of thinking has been attacked throughout human history from many sides and angles, but the most dangerous attack – as regards our topics – came with the birth of environmentalism, the green ideology[1]. This fatal attack – repeated in various forms many times in human history – came together with the activities of the Club of Rome and its infamous book Limits to Growth at the end of the 1960s. The prehistory of these ideas is discussed in many of my articles and books, and with exceptional eloquence in Rupert Darwall’s The Age of Global Warming: A History (Quartet Books, London, 2013.)

As someone who lived in then-Communist Czechoslovakia, I immediately felt the enormous danger hidden in these ideas and saw them, in many respects, as a threat similar to Communism itself. From that moment on, I became a resolute critic of the green ideology (or religion), which has no relation to true science. This ideology has many aspects and subtopics which, at different moments, its proponents have considered fundamental and threatening to mankind. The green ideology found its best and most promising issue – relevant to the whole world – in the hypothesis of dangerous global warming allegedly caused by irresponsible human behaviour.

This alarmist doctrine received a new impetus with the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. This organization guarantees international political (and, of course, even more importantly, financial) backing for the whole green movement. Since that moment, the whole world (or especially its Western part) has been moving in one direction only – towards the victory of the pseudo-scientific ideology of global warming, towards the merciless suppression of the opponents of that ideology and towards a historically-unprecedented conversion of that ideology into government policy. 

These processes have culminated in the official acceptance of the Green New Deal as a fundamental doctrine of the European Union.

There have been several ups and downs in the belief in this ideology in the last four decades, There have been scientific scandals, such as the infamous “hockey stick” graph. There have been moments when the voices of critics of this doctrine were heard more, and moments when they were heard less. But the overall tendency has been clear and one-sided. We are not on the winning side. We have a responsibility to persuade others that we are right. This is a fundamental motivation for our activity.

Where are we now?

We are at an uncertain moment. On the one hand, the critics of climate alarmism are, for many reasons, more silent or less visible than in the past. Some of the old fighters, such as Fred Singer, Bob Carter and George J. Kukla, have died. Some others are tired and getting older. Their academic research carriers have been fundamentally undermined or even damaged beyond repair. 

New generations, indoctrinated in the green ideology from elementary schools onward have never experienced anything other than the official glorification of the alarmist climate doctrine and the arrogant ridiculing of anyone who is against it. These generations of our children and grandchildren take climate alarmism as a self-evident truth.

On the other hand, we are experiencing growing criticism of the destructive consequences of the Green Deal, of the disorganized “energy transition” (artificial and premature, not waiting for technical progress), of the prohibition of coal-fired and nuclear power plants and internal-combustion engines in cars, etc. People are becoming increasingly aware of the costs of attaining the unrealistic goal of net zero emissions. 

We also observe some successful institutional achievements in many nations. I should mention the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change (organized by the late Professor Fred Singer), the long-standing activities of the Heartland Institute in Chicago, the tireless efforts of individuals such as Professor Richard Lindzen, Professor Ross McKitrick and thousands of others. This group of independent thinkers includes Clintel and its founder, Professor Guus Berkhout. 

The influence of those who have kept alive the principle of rigorous scientific research has helped to ensure that in some leading nations the right questions are at last being asked. In the United States, for instance, decisive action has been taken by President Trump and his Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright.

I myself tried to discuss these developments in my book Zničí nás klima nebo boj s klimatem (“Which will destroy us: climate change or the fight against it?”, Cosmopolis, Grada, Prague, 2017, in Czech). This book was published ten years after Blue Planet in Green Shackles. The fact that I did not attempt to publish this book abroad or in a foreign language indicates not only my conviction that everything relevant has already been said (on both sides of the debate), but to some extent also my discouragement resulting from the fact that we are evidently losing ground in the argument in many countries.

The debate is not only technical or scientific. We should not expect a breakthrough based on new data or new scientific arguments. The substance of the debate is ideological. The last chapter of my book was entitled Climate Alarmism as a Part of a New Ideology Aiming Toward Totalitarianism. I emphasized there that environmentalism is not an expression of a love of nature, but a new political superstition.

 What should Clintel do?

I believe that individual members or supporters of Clintel know what to do. They have demonstrated it through their support of Clintel. They are not waiting for my suggestions. They have their own activities and research plans. The question is what should Clintel, as an institution, do in a frozen era when science and politics pretend to know everything and science becomes ever less rigorous as scientists become ever more politicized?

Are we able to specify a new direction for the current debate? Do we see a new window of opportunity? We must decide how to take advantage of that opportunity and how to make full use of all the collective wisdom existing within Clintel. The alternative would be to use Clintel merely as a supporting agency for the dispersed activities of its members.

Let me suggest five topics for our future activity:

1. New climatic data seem to be neither surprising nor extraordinary or persuasive. I do not see any potential breakthrough by more rigorously analysing the data. Am I right or wrong? The two decades of no temperature increase are over. Is there anyone who has a different view? This could be a meaningful topic for a fruitful debate. Is anyone ready to draft a discussion paper that could serve as a starting point for a new round of empirical debate? Data and their interpretation are, of course, an eternal problem. We shouldn’t overlook or ignore them.

 2. We Clintelers do not believe that “The Science Is Settled”. That is one of our main disagreements with the IPCC. We are afraid that climatology, or more accurately the insufficiently structured coagulation of climate sciences, has been transformed from a science (though it was never a normal, traditionally defined, closed, not fuzzy science) into a servant of the global warming ideology. We who, by our education and profession, do not belong to the old “hard” sciences are well aware of the methodological problems such sciences face. The modern era, which promotes “post-normal” science, tends to underestimate any warning we may give. Is anyone among Clintelers ready to prepare an introductory paper either to the methodological problem, or perhaps, a summary of the main “unsettled issues”? That could start an interesting discussion.

3. Some of us see the emptiness of empirical analysis conducted under the auspices of the IPCC and the repeated disregard of mathematical statistics which characterizes the current stage of climatological modelling. I am afraid that today’s climatological models, with their extensive “calibration of parameters” are not very far from the elementary Jay Wright Forrester models of the early Club of Rome. Is anyone able and willing to prepare an introductory paper on this topic?

4. Another crucial aspect of the debate relates to the economic issues and to economic science. Economists discuss the role of prices in decision-making (and the distortions caused by government-dictated prices); the role of discounting in meaningful analysis and prognosis; environmental Kuznets curves; and of course, the infamous energy transition. Last but not least, they are connected with the very problematic carbon credits (sometimes called emission allowances), which non-economists may see as a meaningful contribution by economists to the issue when in fact it is nothing of the kind. In reality, trading in emission allowances (as we see in the EU) is a state-controlled administrative rationing system which only pretends to be market-friendly. Is anyone willing to write anything about this?

5. There is no doubt that climate alarmism is not about climate excesses but about man, about human society. It is a secular ideology, a new political superstition or religion. It expresses an arrogant Western way of looking at the world, based on the thinking and way of life of affluent societies (in the old Galbraithian sense). I do not dare suggest that anyone should work on a concluding summary, but any contribution to it would be very valuable. These topics should not be left solely in the hands of journalists and similar dealers in second-hand ideas, as is usually the case these days.

Conclusion

We who know – together with Fred Singer, who is much missed – that “Nature, Not Human Activity Rules the Climate”, see more than the equations of climatological models. We are actively involved in this debate because we are afraid of the corruption and politicization of science for political ends.

As I asked in the subtitle of Blue Planet in Green Shackles almost 20 years ago, we are interested in discussing “What is Endangered, Climate or Freedom?” I am convinced, and many of us believe, that the climate is more or less OK. Truth alone is worthy of our entire devotion.

Václav Klaus, Address to World Climate Declaration signatories, January 15, 2026