Czech president derogates UN global-warming panel

Feb 9, 2007, 10:55 GMT

Prague - Czech president Vaclav Klaus has criticized the UN panel on global warming, claiming that it was a political authority without any scientific basis, Czech media reported Friday.

Klaus told the Hospodarske noviny daily that the panel did not include 'neutral scientists, a balanced group of scientists.'

'These are politicized scientists who arrive there with one-sided opinion and assignment,' he told interviewers.

According to the Czech president, 'each serious person and scientist' says that global warming is a myth.

His comments came a week after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) presented its much-anticipated report which contained a stark warning about global warming and blamed man-made emissions for the problem.

The IPCC report, compiled by some 600 scientists from 40 countries, said it is 'very likely' that man-made greenhouse gases have caused the rise in temperatures, reflecting a 90-per-cent certainty in the scientific community and an upgrade from a 'likely,' or two-thirds certainty given in the last IPCC report six years ago.

The British government described the UN panel report, presented in Paris on February 2, a blow to the 'climate change deniers.'

US President George W Bush turned away from climate change scepticism in this year's State of the Union speech proposing that the US cut petrol use to fight both global warming and foreign oil dependency, and his administration endorsed the UN panel report.

According to Klaus, 'other top-level politicians' do not express their global warming doubts because 'a whip of political correctness strangles [their] voice'.