The top French weatherman who was sacked from his state broadcaster for speaking inconvenient truths about the non-existence of “man-made-global-warming” has taken exquisite revenge on the alarmist establishment: now he’s got a new job broadcasting from the Kremlin’s propaganda arm, pouring daily scorn on the COP21 climate conference which his president, Francois Hollande, is currently hosting in Paris.
As we reported at Breitbart in October, Philippe Verdier – a household name in France for his nightly weather reports on the France 2 channel – was suspended and then sacked for failing to toe the party line on climate change.
Now Verdier has found an employer more sympathetic to his skepticism. Russia Today – in line with its ultimate boss Vladimir Putin – takes the view that “climate change” is a fraud.
Verdier set the tone on his first broadcast by noting:
“In 2007, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Al Gore and the IPCC climate change experts. They told us ‘if we don’t deal with climate change, there will be more risks to have wars.’ But for 20 years, we are experiencing the warmest years and we have a parallel decline in wars and declining numbers of victims from conflicts.”
He also took a swipe at his president (the French one, that is, not Putin)
“The climate is an excuse to end the year on a high note and steer clear of irritating subjects like unemployment, for which the last figures were dreadful.”
Verdier’s war with his government began he published a book called Climat Investigation, which he wrote after being infuriated last year when his Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius imperiously summoned all France’s weather forecasters and urged them to tell dramatic stories about so-called “climate chaos.”
He accompanied it with an open letter to the French president, attacking the forthcoming Paris conference:
“In two months, France welcomes the COP21, the conference of nations united for the climate. Your political strategy team has told you that it will all come to nothing, like the 20 before it. Then why continue to pretend to be saving the planet?
You, president of the Republic, you cannot support the ultra-politicized scientists of the GEIC, the corporate lobbyists, the NGO environmental groups, nor the self-proclaimed apostles of the new religion of climate.”
Putin is one of the few world leaders who doesn’t even pretend to take climate change seriously.
In 2003 he told a conference that warming would not only mean Russians had to spend less on fur coats but also “agricultural specialists say our grain production will increase, and thank God for that.”
But he is perfectly happy to adjust his position when the need arises. In 2004, for example, he suddenly became a fervent climate change believer as part of a typically shady deal brokered by then British prime minister Tony Blair: Putin agreed to sign up to Kyoto in return for Russia’s being granted admission on favourable terms as a “developing country” to the World Trade Organisation.
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