Dutch geologist Salomon Kroonenberg challenges the alleged consensus

Climate relativist challenges the new orthodoxy

But more importantly, he insists that reducing carbon footprints would not necessarily make a difference to the future of the world.

Urging his audience to see things in terms of geological time, (10,000 years at a stretch), the geologist contends that we are, in fact, living at the peak of summer between ice ages, and, if the cyclical rhythm of climate change is anything to go by, we should be preparing for a "little ice age" like the one experienced between 1350 and 1800.

Often labeled a "climate skeptic" by the anti-CO2-emissions lobby, and criticized for his indifference to the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, in which parliaments of 55 countries decided to cut down on greenhouse emissions, Kroonenberg prefers to call himself a climate relativist. He doesn't consider CO2 emissions "an insurmountable problem" in the context of nature changing and adjusting itself as a continuous process.

"I don't deny climate has been warming and I also do not deny that humankind has emitted large quantities of CO2. I only challenge the importance of that for climate change.

"To assume we human beings have a golden key to keep the world at zero position, is arrogance," he adds.