Reform UK’s deputy leader has dismissed scientific consensus on humans’ role in changing the climate as “garbage”.
Richard Tice MP told Sky’s political correspondent Ali Fortescue: “There’s no evidence that man-made CO2 is going to change climate change. Given that it’s gone on for millions of years, it will go on for millions of years.”
Fortescue challenged him with the findings of a UN group of 200 international scientists that humans activities like burning fossil fuels are to blame for recent climate changes.
“It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land,” reads the 2021 report by the IPCC, which was signed off by all governments, including fossil-fuel-rich Russia, USA and Saudi Arabia.
“No, that’s absolute garbage,” Mr Tice said. “The climate changed for millions of years before man-made CO2.”
The climate did change for years before humans began burning fossil fuels at scale.
But what alarms scientists now is how quickly it is changing – too fast for nature to keep up.
“While Earth’s climate has changed throughout its history, the current warming is happening at a rate not seen in the past 10,000 years,” according to the NASA space and research body.
Professor Sheila Rowan, vice president of the Royal Society of independent scientists said the “evidence is clear” that burning fossil fuels and other human behaviour has “resulted in fundamental changes to our planet”.
Dr Andrew Jarvis from Lancaster University called the comments “categorically wrong”.
Mr Tice also said there were “a thousand” scientists who agreed with him, who were “not a minority”.
An analysis of more than 3,000 peer-reviewed studies found the scientific consensus was climate change caused by humans was greater than 99%.
Bob Ward, policy director at LSE University’s Grantham Research Institute and Geological Society fellow, called the comments “pure misinformation”.
“There is not a single credible scientific organisation in the UK or the world that agrees with him about the causes or consequences of climate change,” said Mr Ward.
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Prof Ed Hawkins from Reading University told Sky News: “Of course there are natural factors which can cause the climate to vary, but they occur slowly, over thousands to millions of years, whereas the warming we have observed has happened over decades.”
The climate has warmed by 1.3C since the pre-industrial era, when humans began to burn fossil fuels at scale, according to the Copernicus science body.
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Earlier last week, Mr Tice had set out plans to impose taxes on the renewable energy sector and scrap the UK’s net zero target, if Reform UK were in power.
He blamed these for higher energy bills and for the deindustrialisation of Britain.
Reform UK only has five MPs, but last week topped a poll of voters for the first time, albeit by a tiny margin.
Prof Hawkins said many solutions to tackle climate change would also boost energy security, provide cleaner air, and lower costs “for everyone”.
“But the cost of delay increases with each passing year.”
Around two in three people who voted for Reform UK last year think it’s important the government cares about climate action, according to research by More In Common.
It found that although Reform voters are “less enthusiastic about climate policies” than other voters, climate is low on their agenda.
Dr George Adamson from King’s College London said the idea that Richard Tice had “discovered something that climate scientists don’t know about is of course preposterous”.
