The climate-change-as-new-world-order-conspiracy trope is going strong south of the equator, with the chairman of Australia’s Business Advisory Council claiming that climate science is filled with “dud predictions.” Maurice Newman, who previously served as chancellor of Macquarie University and headed up the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, expressed his views in an opinion piece (subscriber only) published Friday in The Australian.

”The real agenda is concentrated political authority,” Newman wrote. “Global warming is the hook. It’s about a new world order under the control of the UN.”

Newman was appointed by Prime Minister Tony Abbott to chair the Business Advisory Council and has been a longtime critic of climate science. Although Australia Environment Minister Greg Hunt said Newman’s views were “not something I would express,” according to the BBC, Prime Minister Abbott famously called climate science “crap” back in 2009. When his Liberal Party came to power in 2013, it immediately repealed the carbon tax enacted by the previous government.

In his editorial, Newman made a number of incorrect assertions, including writing that “95 percent of the climate models we are told prove the link between human CO 2 emissions and catastrophic global warming have been found, after nearly two decades of temperature stasis, to be in error.”

In fact, Earth is most decidedly not in a period of temperature stasis, with temps having continued to rise over the past 20 years. Temperatures reversed a long downward trend around 1900, where they began a steep rise which accelerated and led up to 1998, the warmest year on record to that point. Climate change deniers have fixated on those 1998 temps and the “hockey stick” growth leading up to that year to argue that the planet has largely stopped warming. But the data does not support that view: nine of the ten warmest years on record have occurred since 2000, with all-time records set in 2005, 2010, and 2014, the warmest year on record. Ocean temperatures have continued to rise at an alarming pace over the past two decades as well.

Despite what Newman would have his readers believe, the UN’s agenda on anthropogenic climate change is grounded firmly in science. A 2013 survey of over 12,000 studies demonstrated that there is no scientific controversy over the reality of climate change. Indeed, 97 percent of climate scientists are on board with the consensus that human activity is largely responsible for the warming we’ve seen since 1900.

Hopefully the Australian government's stance on climate change won't hinder the nation's meteorologists the next time they need to add a color to the forecast maps due to warming.