Televangelist Pat Robertson on Tuesday pointed to the fact that there were no sport utility vehicles (SUVs) or oil refineries on Mars as evidence that claims of global warming on Earth were a hoax.

Following a segment about how European climate change activists were like a “religious cult,” Robertson explained that he was “not a disciple of global warming.”

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“This is weird,” he noted. “You wonder is there a desire to punish themselves? Is it some kind of innate guilt that is eating at the Europeans? They just seem to be intent on destroying themselves.”

“There’s a fairly large faction of people here in the United States also who follow that whole creed,” co-host Terry Meeuwsen pointed out.

“Yeah,” Robertson agreed. “Is it guilt? Do we think that we have sinned and therefore we have destroyed our planet and therefore we’re going to get it in the neck?”

“Just keep in mind that Mars, and say, ‘How many SUVs, how many oil refineries are there on Mars?’ And yet, it’s the relationship to the sun that is effecting the climate on Mars,” he concluded.

In recent years, some global warming deniers have pointed to a slight warming trend on Mars as evidence that man-made climate change is not real.

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But Penn State meteorologist Michael Mann told Live Science that blaming the sun’s radiation for climate change is just another scapegoat for global warming caused by human activities.

“The small measured changes in solar output and variations from one decade to the next are only on the order of a fraction of a percent, and if you do the calculations not even large enough to really provide a detectable signal in the surface temperature record,” Mann explained.

“Solar activity continues to be one of the last bastions of contrarians,” he added. “People who don’t accept the existence of anthropogenic climate change still try to point to solar activity.”

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Listen to the audio below from CBN’s The 700 Club, broadcast April 17, 2012.

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(H/T: Media Matters)