José María Aznar, former President of the Government of Spain (and President Bush’s good friend) spoke today in Madrid against those ‘standard-bearers of the apocalypse’ who continue to warn about climate change.

Aznar was joined by the President of the Czech Republic Vaklav Klaus for the presentation of the book Planeta Azul (no verde) -A Blue (not green) Planet-, written precisely by Klaus, who happens to be a notoriously active and obstinate climate change negationist. The book is published by Aznar’s conservative think tank, the FAES Foundation.

Here’s a quote from Klaus’ book: “The theory of global warming and the hypothesis on its causes, which has spread around massively nowadays, may be a bad theory, it may also be a valueless theory, but in any case it is a very dangerous theory“.

Great arguments, aren’t they?

It gets worse: In a June 2007 Financial Times article, Vaklav Klaus called environmentalism “the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity“. Klaus has also written that “environmentalism is indeed a vehicle for bringing us socialist government at the global level“. Aznar, on his part, has called environmentalists “the Inquisition of today“.

An important tidbit that not many Americans are aware of is that Aznar sits at the Board of Directors of News Corporation, the media conglomerate of Rupert Murdoch.

Awful and troubling as it is to watch these two rant together against environmentalism and climate change, I find consolation, even if small, in thinking how embarrasing all this is going to be for them in a few years.

I’m sure history will have no mercy on them.