Head in the clouds: these 5 people hurt climate action by blowing hot air in 2015

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The front runner to be the Republican Party's nominee for US president in 2016 doesn't "believe in global warming". In an interview in September, he said global warming "isn't a problem that in any major fashion exists", and challenged anyone to prove it did. Apparently for Trump, it's not enough that there is 97% consensus among scientists that global warming is for real.

Although he later accepted that global warming was real, the billionaire insisted that it was natural rather than man-made. Here is the Trump Theory of Climate Change: "I believe there's weather. I believe there's change, and I believe it goes up and it goes down, and it goes up again."

It this wasn't bizarrely incoherent, he went on a tangent: "You know, to me, the worst global warming, and I mentioned this to you once before, is nuclear warming. That's our global warming. That's what I see, because we have incompetent people, and we have these rogue nations, and not even rogue nations anymore."

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Rupert Murdoch controls some of the world's most influential media outlets, including the National Geographic magazine and TV channel. It appears he's also an amateur climate scientist. While other scientists need at least 15 years of data to show climate patterns, he does it in a jiffy.

It's all simple, really. For Murdoch, the existence of anything cold is chilling proof that there's no global warming.

Here's a summary of his methodology:

Murdoch: Can you think of at least one sheet of ice existing on the planet?

You: Of course.

Murdoch: There, no global warming.

Flying over the North Atlantic ocean in February, the media mogul tweeted a picture of the winter ice and wrote, "Just flying over N Atlantic 300 miles of ice. Global warming!"

Just flying over N Atlantic 300 miles of ice. Global warming! pic.twitter.com/loXwe7lwtK

- Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) February 27, 2015

No matter that NASA has found ice sheets in the Arctic melting at a rate of 9% every 10 years.

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Unlike Trump, Murdoch and Cruz, Modi isn't known to be a climate change denier. In fact, he spoke strongly in favour of climate action at the Paris meet. So, his comments just a few months before the summit came as a surprise to everyone.

He said it wasn't the climate that had changed but our ability to tolerate changes in weather. Worse, he said this, through video conferencing, to schoolchildren across the country on Teacher's Day.

A student from a central school in Assam asked him about dealing with climate change. The question was quite straightforward: "Sir, how can you help and guide us to save our pristine environment?" You would have expected a stock response.

Modi's reply, however, was jaw-dropping: "70, 80, 85 or 90 year old people, often during winters, you'll notice they say it's colder this year than the year before. Don't they say such things? Actually it's not colder. Their capacity to tolerate cold has reduced due to aging. In the same manner, the climate has not changed. We have changed."

Also read - COP21: despite Modi's strong speech, India is losing out to the West

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Trump isn't the only climate change denier who is in the running to be arguably the most powerful man on earth. Ted Cruz, another Republican, simply thinks that climate change is a matter of religious belief.

Strike that. He said climate change is religion. "Climate change is not science. It's religion," he said in an interview in October. He explained: "Look at the language, where they call you a denier... the language of the global warming alarmists, 'denier' is the language of religion, it's heretic, you are a blasphemer."

It's no secret that industrialised nations are most responsible for global warming. They have emitted nearly half of the harmful carbon dioxide gas that's in our atmosphere. India's share is just 5-6%. Yet, even as India was emphasising this point ahead of the Paris summit, Gandhi suddenly called it "rubbish".

She said India was "one of the main players in destroying the climate". Her argument was that India is the second largest producer of methane, which is more potent than carbon dioxide.

Bizarrely, even though methane comes from plants and cattle, her solution was to plant even more trees. A billion of them each month.

Not only do trees not reduce methane emission - they convert only carbon dioxide to oxygen - they actually add to it. So, the minister's idea to plant a billion trees to cut down methane will actually achieve the opposite.

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