On the day the government moved to save 15 of 35 climate science positions planned to be cut at the CSIRO, the Senate election results in Queensland showed One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts had won a second seat for the party in that state.

He stood in front of the media and denounced the government for taking part in an international climate change conspiracy and called for all policies that aim to reduce greenhouse gases to be abandoned.

This is the climate sceptic behind Pauline Hanson’s latest political journey.

Roberts is the “project leader” of a group called the Galileo Movement. It launched in 2011, with the aim of exposing what its leaders described as the “political fabrication of global warming alarm”.

He claimed in 2012 in an interview with Fairfax Media that climate science is controlled “by some of the major banking families in the world” who collude “in a tight-knit cabal with the United Nations”.

Those comments were one step too far even for News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt, who himself has argued that climate change is all a big conspiracy.

But now, elected to federal parliament, Roberts did not shy away from this statement.

“I’ve done a lot of research into climate,” he said at a media conference on Thursday. “I went looking into the agencies that have been spreading the climate science. I started finding out things about the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology. That led me then to the UN, which has been driving this. Then I started following the money trails.”

He went on to explain that they could be traced back to a few families who are making “trillions” of dollars.

When One Nation announced its policies for this year’s election, an attack on climate science was strangely prominent.

Alongside a “royal commission to determine if Islam is a religion or political ideology” the party has also called for “a royal commission (or similar) into the corruption of climate science”.

“Climate change should not be about making money for a lot of people and giving scientists money,” the party’s website says.

This renewed focus on climate change had the fingerprints of Malcolm Roberts all over it.

Roberts says he is a scientist (he has a mining engineering degree) and that the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology are no longer involved in science, since he says there is nothing to support the climate science they do. “All we need to do is stop these ridiculous lies based on climate,” he said.

Whether Roberts will have any impact on the functioning of the new parliament is not yet clear. But he said he has been called by both Malcolm Turnbull and attorney general, George Brandis.

“They offered their congratulations and then said they would make sure they would get the resources to us so we could do our jobs,” he said.