In 2009 when holding the position of Environment Minister, Mr Wilson caused international headlines when he used ministerial powers to ban government global warming television adverts, branding them green “propaganda”. He still holds the view that climate change is not caused by human influence.

Now grabbing the subject by the horns once again, he has blasted the idea that record temperatures this month are due to human factors - and blamed other parties in the assembly for the drive to green energy which has seen major focus on his party leader Arlene Foster for her role in allowing the fatally flawed £400m Renewable Health Initiative (RHI) scheme to progress in her department when Enterprise minister.

He said: “Generally politicians have fallen for the green guff that people are going to destroy the earth because we heat our houses, fly away on our holidays, drive our cars, eat meat use plastics all of which require oil, gas and coal to be consumed. In doing so we cause CO2 a harmless indeed life giving gas to be emitted and this is causing the earth to warm.

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“When we get the odd warm day in December as we did last week or a year when due to good weather temperatures are above the average, the green propaganda machine goes into overdrive as they claim another sign that the world is about to burn up.”

NASA, the Met office and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have all accepted, he said, that despite global increases in CO2 emissions, there has been a pause in the increase in world temperatures.

He added: “The last week has seen a unfair blitz on Arlene Foster because of the massive wasteful expenditure on the renewable energy scheme which pays recipients massive subsidies to burn wood chips. By the way, this form of energy production has seen the devastation of forests across Europe in order to make the wood chips, ironically removing the very trees which absorb CO2.”

By contrast, there had been “hysterical calls” from every party in the Assembly to put greater emphasis on renewable energy “”even though as I often pointed out, it was expensive, inefficient and hurt our economy”.

He added: “Our obsession with man-made global warming led to a climate change act which set national targets for CO2 emission reductions. This in turn resulted in a mad energy policy and a closing down of sensible discussion by politicians or critical scrutiny by civil servants. That is why we need to question stupid claims that a year of record temperatures is a sign of world doom otherwise we will continue to pay chancers and opportunists millions to pump heat from wood chips into the atmosphere. Now that IS man-made global warming!”

A spokeswoman for the Met Office confirmed that the seventh day of this month was the warmest December day on record since 1994, with 15.9C at Magilligan.

However she noted this was a record for one day in the month and it was much too early to say what the month average would be overall, which would give a much more significant perspective.

She added that “any given weather event has to be fully researched before it can be attributed to any cause, such as climate change”.