Maurice Newman, the chairman of Australia's business advisory council. On 8 May 2015, he claimed climate change is a ruse encouraged by the United Nations to create a new authoritarian world order under its control. Photo: The Independent

7 May 2015 (AFP) – Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s top business advisor on Friday claimed climate change was a ruse encouraged by the United Nations to create a new authoritarian world order under its control. Maurice Newman, chairman of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council, said the real agenda was “concentrated political authority. Global warming is the hook”. In a column for The Australian newspaper to coincide with a visit by UN climate chief Christiana Figueres, he added that the world had been “subjected to extravagance from climate catastrophists for close to 50 years”. “It’s a well-kept secret, but 95 percent of the climate models we are told prove the link between human CO2 emissions and catastrophic global warming have been found, after nearly two decades of temperature stasis, to be in error,” he said, without providing evidence. Newman, a former chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, is a known climate change sceptic but he went further by accusing the UN of being involved in a scam. “Figueres is on record saying democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming. Communist China, she says, is the best model,” he wrote. “This is not about facts or logic. It’s about a new world order under the control of the UN. It is opposed to capitalism and freedom and has made environmental catastrophism a household topic to achieve its objective.” Figueres, in charge of getting a global emissions reduction agreement in Paris in December, was in Australia to discuss practical climate change action. She was not immediately available for comment Friday. With its use of coal-fired power and relatively small population, Australia is one of the world’s worst per capita greenhouse gas polluters and has been increasingly isolated over its perceived reluctance to do more to tackle the climate threat. [more]

Australia PM advisor says climate change a UN-led ruse