Views On Climate Change
As ACT leader, Hide criticised Labour's emissions trading scheme in September 2008 and said climate change and global warming were a "hoax". He said that the data and the hypothesis did not hold together, and that the legislation would drive up the cost of basic goods, ruining businesses and farmers. Hide stated "the entire climate change - global warming hypothesis is a hoax, that the data and the hypothesis do not hold together, that Al Gore is a phoney and a fraud on this issue, and that the emissions trading scheme is a worldwide scam and swindle". In November 2008, after ACT had negotiated with National for a review of the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme, New Zealand Herald journalist Brian Rudman commented that Hide had "fruitcake views on global warming".
In 2010, in a speech to Parliament, Hide compared government-funded climate science to the Spanish inquisition. He also accused the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research of being involved in a scandal with its temperature data and claimed that its scientific credibility was shredded. In response, climate change blogger Gareth Renownden described Hide as "parliament’s highest-profile climate 'skeptic', with a long track record of spouting the standard climate crank arguments"
In 2012, Hide was still writing opinion articles in the press questioning climate science and emissions trading schemes. In the National Business Review, Hide wrote that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 was 'infamously wrong' and contained schoolboy errors and had been written by people who had to 'believe the human-induced global warming nonsense before they start'. In the Herald, Hide said that the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is a 'scam and a waste'. Hide agreed that CO2 from fossil fuels is a greenhouse gas that has caused warming, but that the warming wasn't worrying until the effect had been multiplied with computer models that are programmed to cause scary climate change.
Read more about this topic: Rodney Hide
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