Holed up in a hotel near New York’s Times Square are hundreds of leading figures in the debate that won’t go away – climate change. Those talking at the Heartland Institute’s conference “Global warming: Was it ever really a crisis?” are there to discuss, as the past-tense of the title might hint at, the existence, or rather non-existence of global warming.

One of the headline-grabbing speakers is Czech premier Václav Klaus. He’s an ardent climate-change skeptic, but because of the rolling nature of European Union presidency, he is also premier of the current incumbent presidential country, raising his profile somewhat.

“It is evident that the climate change debate has not made any detectable progress,” he said. “It reminds me of the frustration people like me felt in the communist era.” So says the Guardian.

The Huffington Post says that Klaus’s attendance was a coup, being celebrated by the event’s organisers, which The HP says are fast being abandoned by high-profile supporters.

The Prague Daily Monitor highlights Klaus’s climate change merry-go-round, it seems he has also been speaking at an economics and climate change meeting, where he didn’t quite meet Al Gore.

Enviro-blog Grist has its own version of speaker profiles, with an amusing photo to illustrate. And just to balance things out, someone here is very excited about going to the conference, looking forward, he says to hearing “at least some voices speaking up for intellectual freedom and scientific objectivity”.

Meanwhile, next week a huge climate change conference begins, also in Europe. Denmark this time. The climate conference in Copenhagen gathers world leaders to discuss policy to tackle climate change, eventually lading to the Copenhagen Protocol. Like Kyoto only more so. Presumably there will be very little cross-over between attendees at the two shindigs.