Some pretty big names are in New York City taking part in a major climate change industry conference just days before the International Panel on Climate Change prepares to deliver its fifth report on global climate change in Stockholm on Friday. Setting off the major conference in a big way on Monday, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed that man is to blame for climate change.

“After this panel assessment this week, there will no longer be any serious doubt in the minds of serious people that this is a serious problem,” Blair said, “The question is can we find the means of galvanising the [political] leaderships to act in the way they should?”

Blair and many of the speakers had set off a tone to disparage the media’s renewed skepticism toward climate change. Recent research has determined that there has been no significant temperature increase in global average temperature over the last decade and a half, which contradicts the predictions and warnings the IPCC had previously made. It also contradicts past climate models, where most of the IPCC and climate change research bases their predictions off of.

Skeptics have jumped on the new research findings as proof that the IPCC models are fundamentally flawed; during the New York Climate Change week, Blair said the report would show it was “ninety-five percent” certain that global warming was man-made and that the time for debate has ended.

“Ninety-five percent certain, is a pretty large degree of certainty–I recall that the number of people who think Elvis is still alive is round about five percent,” he added, to laughter.

Todd Stern and the U.S. special envoy on climate change both spoke after Blair. Even Jim Yong Kim, the World Bank president, walked up to the lectern to speak, lambasting the climate skeptic critics far more than Blair did during his speech.

“We have to stop with these silly arguments and move forward on thinking about what we are going to do,” Kim said. He cited studies from the World Bank that mapped out the potential consequences of global warming. According to Kim, one of the predictions claims that Bangkok could start slipping beneath the ocean surface by 20303. “Now these other explanation, and the people who doubt the existence of man-made climate change, I would simply say, the doubters don’t have a problem with climate change, they have a problem with science.”