Environmental experts have brutally slammed Richard Tice for claiming it is “absolute garbage” to say human activities are the main cause of climate change.
The Reform UK deputy leader suggested Nasa and the UN were wrong to report that the leading cause of climate change is human activities, arguing he could name thousands of scientists 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.”
“There is so much money and vested interests who are trying to push this agenda on us. It has to stop and only Reform UK is going to stop it,” he added in a fiery Sky News interview.
But, experts have hit back to rebuke Tice’s remarks. Bob Ward, the policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, told The London Economic: “The comments by Richard Tice are pure misinformation.”
He said: “Scientists have proven beyond reasonable doubt that the recent rise in global temperature and associated climate change is not caused by the same factors that drove climate change in the past. We know for instance that a large meteorite has not hit the Earth recently, or that the Earth has wobbled in its orbit to be closer to the Sun.
“But 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.
“Richard Tice is supposed to represent the people of Boston and Skegness, a constituency which a study in November concluded was the second most vulnerable in England to sea level rise and the other impacts of climate change. If he does not accept the very clear evidence about the cause of climate change, which is harming lives and livelihoods in his constituency, then he is not fit to represent them in Parliament.”
Tice’s comments come days after The London Economic revealed his boss, Nigel Farage, welcomed a notorious climate change denier, Lois Perry of The Heartland Institute, to his party’s new head offices in Millbank.
Her thinktank, which has been funded by oil and gas giant, believes climate change is “natural and not man-made” and has reportedly worked with far-right groups from across Europe.
Farage has been sceptical about climate change himself, despite two-thirds of his Clacton constituents being concerned about it. In July, he told Jordan Peterson: “I do find it extraordinary that people call carbon dioxide a pollutant, because as I understand it, plants don’t grow without carbon dioxide.”
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