Nigel Farage has been slammed for saying it is “absolutely nuts” to call carbon dioxide a pollutant.
The Reform UK leader suggested the United Nations and the Environmental Protection Agency are wrong to call the gas a “pollutant” saying it drives him “absolutely potty”.
Talking to Jordan Peterson at the rightwing Ark conference, he said: “That’s the one thing that drives me absolutely potty: when I hear that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. That’s what they tell us.
“That clearly is absolutely nuts. Now, there are times in our past when CO2 in the atmosphere has been much, much higher than it is today.”
He added: So I’m not a scientist. I can’t tell you whether CO2 is leading to warming or not. But there are so many other massive factors. So we do, as you rightly say, need to get this debate into a sense of perspective.
“And I sometimes think that the carbon dioxide hysteria has actually blinded us to other environmental disasters that are going on, such as the rape of our oceans and many other things. I’m an environmentalist in the old school sense and definition of that term, but more common sense.”
But, scientists have brutally fact checked his party’s beliefs.
Bob Ward, the policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, told The London Economic earlier this week: “We have known for more than 150 years that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas because its effect has been measured in the laboratory and we know from ice cores that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today is about 50 per cent higher than before we started burning fossil fuels.
“We also know from isotopic measurements that the rise in carbon dioxide concentrations is due to the burning of fossil fuels.”
The United Nations also agree: “Fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – are by far the largest contributor to global climate change, accounting for over 75 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and nearly 90 per cent of all carbon dioxide emissions.”
It is the second time in the last few days scientists have been forced to make a rare intervention in politics, as Richard Tice, the deputy leader of Reform UK, claimed it is “absolute garbage” to say human activities are the main cause of climate change over the weekend.
He told Sky News he could name thousands of experts who agree with him but won’t come forward because they are “terrified to speak because they won’t get any research funding if they tell it how it is.”
Dr George Adamson from King’s College London said the idea that Tice had “discovered something that climate scientists don’t know about is of course preposterous.”
Professor Sheila Rowan, vice president of The Royal Society of Independent Scientists, said the “evidence is clear” that burning fossil fuels has “resulted in fundamental changes to our planet”.
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