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		The Florenz Report (Global Warming) Plenary Speech - Wednesday, 4th February 2009 Mr. President Five hundred years ago, there was a consensus amongst scientists that the World was Flat. They were wrong. In the 1970s, after three decades of global cooling, there was a consensus among scientists that we were facing a new Ice Age. They were wrong. In 1999, everyone believed that the Millennium Bug would create a global disaster by closing down computer systems across the world. Weapons systems would fail, commerce stop, planes fall out of the sky. They were wrong. Nothing at all happened. Today, there is said to be a consensus around catastrophic man-made global warming. It too is wrong. Nor is it a consensus. The myth of consensus is a propaganda triumph for the Warmists. But repeated surveys, both of the scientific literature and of working climate scientists, show a wide range of views on both sides, with many believing that there is too little data to be sure. It is true that the world has warmed slightly, although slowly and intermittently, over the last 150 years. But this is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate cycles that gave us the Roman Optimum, the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. There is clear evidence that while the world has warmed slightly, other bodies in the Solar System have also warmed. Ice-caps have shrunk on Mars, yet no one imagines that 4X4s are to blame. We are now planning to spend unimaginable sums of money on mitigation measures which will simply not work, and by damaging our economies will deny us the funds we need to address real environmental problems. As a British journalist, Christopher Booker, has remarked, global warming alarmism is the greatest collective flight from reality in human history.