‘Climate has been changing for four billion years,’ said Nikolas Sarkozy, the former French president and also a candidate for future elections.
Sarkozy has previously been critical of climate change covering, complaining that the Climate Summit in Paris 2015 received too much attention. He also minimized the impact of climate change, but it’s the first time he goes full out, stating that there’s no way mankind is causing climate change.
“Climate has been changing for four billion years,” the former president told a panel of business leaders this week, the weekly Marianne reported. “Sahara has become a desert, it isn’t because of industry. You need to be as arrogant as men are to believe we changed the climate.”
He also reportedly said that Europe should focus more on stopping migrants and less on global warming.
Now, we wouldn’t normally focus much on such statements, but Sarkozy, who lost his presidency in 2012 to François Hollande, is a frontrunner for the next presidential elections in France. Having a leader who is openly a climate skeptic in a country like France can be extremely dangerous – and yes, people who say mankind isn’t causing climate change should be considered climate skeptics.
Needless to say, climate change is real and we are causing it – as this amazing XKCD comic shows. There’s a trove of scientific data on man-made climate change and there’s a virtual consensus on climate change in the scientific world. Just 0.17% of all peer reviewed papers offer arguments for climate skepticism. The most comprehensive report on climate change to date concluded that “with a certainty of 95%, climate change is man made.”
There’s no scientific debate, but unfortunately, politicians seem to follow a different agenda. Just a couple of months ago, the new UK prime minister Theresa May all but dissolved the public climate change office, and US Republican candidate Donald Trump is an open denier of climate change.