London: Former prime minister Tony Abbott has told a right-wing conference he had never believed in human-driven climate change as he vowed the “climate cult” would one day be defeated.
Abbott was speaking at the launch of the Institute of Public Affairs’ new paper Energy Security is National Security, held on the sidelines of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London.
He revealed that when he had professed to support cutting carbon emissions as prime minister and leader of the Coalition, he had always added a disclaimer that it should not cost jobs or send dirtier forms of energy generation to countries that were not as serious about reducing greenhouse gases.
“And when I was feeling particularly bold, I would add things like this, I would say, ‘you know, 10,000 years or so back we had an Ice Age, that was rather dramatic climate change, but presumably that had nothing to do with mankind’s carbon dioxide emissions’,” Abbott said.
Abbott, who was appointed to the board of Fox Corporation in late September as soon as Lachlan Murdoch took over from his father Rupert Murdoch as sole chairman, said he would point to the Medieval warm period and the Little Ice Age as further examples that climate had “nothing to do with mankind’s emissions”.
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“So I think it is worth stating that the anthropogenic global warming thesis, at least in its more extreme forms, is both ahistorical and utterly implausible. And I think that needs to be repeated a little more,” he said.
According to NASA, 97 per cent of the world’s scientists agree that humans are causing both global warming and climate change.
“Scientific evidence continues to show that human activities, primarily the human burning of fossil fuels, have warmed Earth’s surface and its ocean basins, which in turn have continued to impact Earth’s climate,” an article on NASA’s website reads. “This is based on over a century of scientific evidence forming the structural backbone of today’s civilisation.”