The World Federation of Scientists, at its annual seminars on planetary emergencies,
has been advised by its own climate monitoring panel that global warming is no longer a planetary emergency. The President of the Italian Senate, Judge Pietro Grasso … and the President of the Federation, Professor Antonino Zichichi {emeritus professor of Physics, U of Bologna}, said that care should be taken to examine carefully the basis for concern about CO2 emissions as well as the relevance and cost-effectiveness of proposed mitigation measures.
… “Our greatest concern at present is that the intellectual climate for scientific investigation of these matters has become so hostile and politicized that the necessary research and debate cannot freely take place. Political constraints take the form of declaring the underlying science to be settled when it clearly is not; defunding or denigrating research that is perceived to threaten the case for renewable energy; or the use of odious pejoratives like “denialist” to describe dissent from officially-sanctioned views on climate science.”
… Professor Essex called for “free and open debate on all aspects of climate science, even where hypotheses are put forward for examination that openly contradict the official positions of political entities.”
He said the panel found persuasive indications that climate models systematically understated natural climate variability and significantly exaggerated the impact of CO2 emissions. Accordingly, past, present and proposed policy measures could be shown not to provide net benefits to society regardless of the rate at which the planet might warm. Limited resources would be better devoted to more pressing issues.
