WSJ: Vaclav Klaus on global warming

The weekend Wall Street Journal features an interview with Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who will be the keynote speaker at this year’s CEI dinner — on May 28 in Washingotn, D.C. — in which he discusses his interest in the politics of global warming.

“I am not a climatologist,” Mr. Klaus cheerfully admits. “I am not disputing the measurement of the temperature.” Even so, Mr. Klaus believes that his many years of experience in the fields of economics and econometrics give him some insight into the nature of the problems faced by climatologists and policy makers. In climatology as in economics, he says, “there are no controlled experiments. . . . You can’t repeat the time series.” So, just as you can’t run a controlled experiment to determine the effect of, say, deficits on interest rates, we can’t directly determine the effect of CO2 on climate. All we have are observations and inferences.

Mr. Klaus is also interested in the politics of global warming. He has written a book, tentatively titled “Blue, Not Green Planet,” published in Czech last year and due out in English translation in the U.S. this May. The main question of the book is in its subtitle: “What is in danger: climate or freedom?”

President Klaus’s book, I should mention, is being published by CEI in the United States.