However mightily the wind howls, the moutain does not move

Think up of a world leader who goes against the world opinion on the issue of climate change, who scorns the doomsday scenarios and does not have much time for activists calling for radical changes.
It's George Bush, right?
Wrong!
Bush often stands stubbornly on what he thinks is right- think Iraq. Yet too often he is a politician too. He takes stands that appear to be popular or that would invite less abuse from the screaming classes- think immigration. And so it appears that he is giving in, bit by bit, to the global warming lobby.
So Bush is not it.
Besides he would never say things like these-

"The so called climate change and especially man-made climate change has become one of the most dangerous arguments aimed at distorting human efforts and public policies in the whole world."

or-

"I agree with Professor Richard Lindzen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who said: "future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century's developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age".

"The issue of global warming is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom than about tenths of a degree Celsius changes in average global temperature."

No world leader would be caught dead saying this.
So who is this mountain that stands while the collective(and collectivist) army of environmentalists, activist media and scientists cow every one before them?

It's Vaclav Klaus, the Czech President.
Just some excerpts from the remarkable(in these crazy times common sense truth does appear to be remarkable) speech and an op-ed-

"The environmentalists consider their ideas and arguments to be an undisputable truth and use sophisticated methods of media manipulation and PR campaigns to exert pressure on policymakers to achieve their goals. Their argumentation is based on the spreading of fear and panic by declaring the future of the world to be under serious threat. In such an atmosphere they continue pushing policymakers to adopt illiberal measures, impose arbitrary limits, regulations, prohibitions, and restrictions on everyday human activities and make people subject to omnipotent bureaucratic decision-making. To use the words of Friedrich Hayek, they try to stop free, spontaneous human action and replace it by their own, very doubtful human design."

"By concentrating on the human contribution to the climate change the environmentalists ask for immediate political action based on limiting economic growth, consumption, or human behavior they consider hazardous. They do not believe in the future economic expansion of the society, they ignore the technological progress the future generations will enjoy, and they ignore the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society is, the higher is the quality of the environment. "

"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."

Go read them both.It's a strong gale of fresh air. The op-ed is appropriately titled-What is at risk is not the climate but freedom.

I delight in imagining that if our own Manu(Manmohan) was given a similar speech to read out, he would faint of shock!