Following Donald Trump’s shock victory in the US presidential election, and his widely reported quotes denying that climate change exists, we got to thinking – How many other public figures out there don’t believe in climate change? Let’s take a look at some of the most high profile figures denying that climate change exists. We would like to note that out of 69,408 climate scientists across the globe who published papers between 2013-2014, only 4 of these scientists did not accept that humans cause climate change. Denial of man-made global warming is almost non-existent within the field of climate science today.
Nigel Farage
Nigel Farage is the outgoing leader of right wing UK based political party Ukip. Farage himself has been openly disparaging of Climate Change science on many occasions, and his party stance is that climate change is “open to question” and “grossly exaggerated”. Nigel Farage once stated “I think wind energy is the biggest collective economic insanity I’ve seen in my entire life. I’ve never seen anything more stupid, more illogical, or more irrational.” Meanwhile, in 2015 Denmark broke the world record to produce 42% of its electricity from wind turbines, despite two major wind farms being offline and has frequently produced in excess of 140% of its power needs per day from wind turbines.
Rupert Murdoch
Rupert Murdoch owns and operates a vast media empire. In the UK, his media assets include The Times and The Sun. In the USA, he owns Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post,. Most of Murdochs outlets openly and regularly deny climate change, propagate myths, and print misinformation and falsities on a daily basis. Rupert Murdoch recently stated “In terms of the world’s temperature going up, the worst, the most alarmist things have said … 3°C in 100 years. At the very most one of those will come from man-made, be man-made.”
In fact, the 2014 IPCC report projects a worse case scenario of about 4°C global surface warming over the next century, all of which would be human-caused. The best case scenario would involve about 1°C global surface warming over the next century, provided world leaders clamp down on business and get serious on taking action to reduce carbon emissions. Rupert Murdoch’s media empire continues to be highly politicized in the UK and the US, widely seen to be influencing elections, and supporting huge corporate interests that he is affiliated with.
Tony Abbott
Tony Abbott is the former prime minister of Australia infamously told a Liberal Party dinner in 2009 that he thought the science of human-caused climate change was “crap”. Tony Abbott was long viewed as a maverick and deeply unpopular before he assumed power in Australia. Known for his conservative Catholic views and nicknamed by some as the “Mad Monk” due to once attempting to train as a Catholic priest, Abbott has repeatedly supported mining and coal burning industries, and promoted climate change denial. Abbott wrote: “Whether humans have had a significant impact on the climate as a whole is much less clear… in Roman times, grapes were widely grown in Britain” and how “in medieval times, Greenland supported agriculture”. Abbott has repeatedly cast doubt on proven fact-backed climate science, and repealed the country’s carbon tax legislation and emissions laws. Australia continues to be one of the world’s leading economies in mining and fossil fuels export. It is has one of the highest per capita emissions of carbon dioxide in the world, and uses coal to generate 70% of its power.
The Koch Brothers
Charles and David Koch own Koch Industries – an oil corporation that is the second largest privately held company in America. Koch Industries has made Billions of dollars in profit for the Koch Brothers, and their company has an exceptionally poor environmental record. The Koch Brothers have sent at least $88.8 million dollars directly to 80 groups denying climate change science since 1997.
Christopher Walter Monckton
Christopher Walter Monckton is the 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley is a British public speaker, hereditary peer, Conservative Advisor and UKIP political candidate. He is a strong critic of climate science and is known for extreme rhetoric on the subject. Monckton wrote a venomous article about US President Obama, in which he wrote that Obama “has been taken in, hook, line and sinker, by catastrophic anthropogenic climate alarm” and would “continue to inflict crippling taxes and regulations in the name of saving the planet from ‘global warming'”. Christopher Monckton told an audience that the aim of a UN climate change treaty on climate change was to “impose a communist world government”. Perhaps at his most divisive, Monkton was once forced to apologize after comparing an Australian climate change adviser to the Nazis.
Climate change denial continues to be most widespread in Western, English speaking countries. According to a report published in 2014 by Ipsos Mori, a UK based market research group that consulted 16,000 people in 20 countries, the United States had more climate change deniers than any other country. Britain and Australia each had the second and third largest percentage of respondents who said they did not agree with the notion of human-caused climate change.
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