Scientists have spoken out after Reform UK’s deputy leader dismissed scientific consensus on man-made climate as “garbage”.

Richard Tice MP told Sky’s political correspondent Ali Fortescue: “There’s no evidence that man-made CO2 is going to change climate change. Given that it’s gone on for millions of years, it will go on for millions of years.”

Fortescue challenged him with the findings of more than 200 international scientists that humans activities like burning fossil fuels are to blame for the recent hotter climate.

Human influence is “unequivocal”, said the report, which was signed off by all governments, including fossil-fuel-rich Russia, USA and Saudi Arabia.

“No, that’s absolute garbage,” Mr Tice said. “The climate changed for millions of years before man-made CO2.”

Dr George Adamson from King’s College London said the idea that Richard Tice had “discovered something that climate scientists don’t know about is of course preposterous”.

The climate did change for years before humans began burning fossil fuels at scale.

But what alarms scientists now is how quickly it has changed in the last few decades – too fast for nature or societies to keep up.

Many came out today to rebut Mr Tice’s claims.

Dr Andrew Jarvis from Lancaster University called the comments “categorically wrong”, while Dr Philipp Breul from Imperial College London said Mr Tice was “missing the point”.

“We are causing the climate to change significantly faster than it has, to the best of our knowledge, in the last million years,” added Dr Breul.

“This incredibly fast rate of change is the real problem, as it does not leave neither society nor the ecosystem time to adapt.”

Professor Sheila Rowan, vice president of The Royal Society of independent scientists, said the “evidence is clear” that burning fossil fuels has “resulted in fundamental changes to our planet”.

Mr Tice also said there were “a thousand” scientists who agreed with him, who were “not a minority”.

But the scientific consensus on humans causing recent climate change is greater than 99%, according to an analysis of more than 3,000 peer-reviewed studies.

Bob Ward, policy director at LSE University’s Grantham Research Institute and Geological Society fellow, called the comments “pure misinformation”.

“There is not a single credible scientific organisation in the UK or the world that agrees with him about the causes or consequences of climate change,” said Mr Ward.

Prof Ed Hawkins from Reading University told Sky News: “Of course there are natural factors which can cause the climate to vary, but they occur slowly, over thousands to millions of years, whereas the warming we have observed has happened over decades.”

The climate has warmed by 1.3C since the pre-industrial era, when humans began to burn fossil fuels at scale, according to the Copernicus science body.

Earlier last week, Mr Tice set out plans to impose taxes on the renewable energy sector and scrap the UK’s net zero target, if Reform UK were elected into power.

He blamed these for higher energy bills and for the deindustrialisation of Britain.

Reform UK only has five MPs, but last week topped a poll of voters for the first time, albeit by a tiny margin.

Around two in three people who voted for Reform UK last year think it’s important the government cares about climate action, according to research by More In Common.

It found that although Reform voters are “less enthusiastic about climate policies” than other voters, climate is low on their agenda.