On climate change, Owen Paterson doesn’t know what he’s talking about – but neither do the Government

Until three months ago, Owen Paterson was the Minister for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. This is pretty frightening considering the comments he made yesterday. He told a room full of people that climate change forecasts were “consistently and wildly exaggerated,” before calling for the Government to scrap the Climate Change Act.

Paterson might well have been in good company last night when he made this sweeping declaration at the Global Warming Policy Foundation – one of the UK’s most well-known climate change-denying lobby groups (their chairperson is renowned climate change denier Nigel Lawson). Yet when it comes to experts in the field, he’s a relatively lone voice.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have showed that anthropogenic (human-made) climate change is a very real issue indeed. Their report last year said they could assert with 95% certainty that humans are the main cause of current climate change, and that as the world warms, food insecurity will rise because of  more intense droughts, floods, and heat waves.

The threat climate change poses to people across the world is also highlighted by The United Nations who have said it’s “becoming apparent that climate change will have implications for the enjoyment of human rights”. There’s also ongoing research into the link between climate change and human rights abuses.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather take the word of experts in the field, who’ve spent their whole lives researching the subject, than Paterson – a man who, despite overwhelming evidence, said rises in the temperature of 1-2.5% were modest (he fails to realise, as the Guardian’s Adam Vaughan explains, that average temperature rises are spread evenly across the planet, and therefore cause extreme rises in particular areas like the Arctic) and who believes the atmosphere hasn’t warmed over the past 18 years (the fact is, it has) .

Paterson’s comments could easily dismissed as those of someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about – and they have been effectively ripped to shreds by the Committee on Climate Change. But they’re also a worrying indication of the Government’s complacency when it comes to climate change.

David Cameron appointed Paterson to be Minister for the Environment, and kept him there for two years, despite knowing he was a climate change sceptic. At the Tory Party conference last year, Paterson dismissed climate change as relatively unimportant, saying “people get very emotional about this subject and I think we should just accept that the climate has been changing for centuries” . Under his stewardship, the government cut money for adapting the country to global warming by 40%, including money for flood protection.

Then again, this was all signed-off by David Cameron, a man who went from declaring “vote blue, go green” before the election – I believe we’re still waiting for the “green revolution – to saying he wanted to “get rid of all that green crap” from energy bills.

The Labour leadership are, undoubtedly, better when it comes to giving due attention to climate change. Yet, they too have a way to go. Alongside Labour’s highly questionable and most likely damaging proposals for fracking (that I heard criticised by a significant number of people at Women’s Conference this year) and nuclear power, there is evidence Kevin Anderson  for “significantly” strengthening the Climate Change Act “in line with the science” – as well as encouraging more robust international agreement on the subject.

All evidence suggests climate change should be at the top of the political agenda –  this might be an uncomfortable truth for many, but it is a truth nonetheless.