Lord Christopher Monckton believes Tony Abbott's stance on climate change led to his political downfall. Credit:Peter Hannam The comments came during a day-long conference held by climate sceptic groups at the elegant Hotel California, just off the Champs-Elysees in Paris. Billed as a "day of examining the data", the meeting of about 15 people got off to a rowdy start when anti-coal protesters from Australia tried to gate-crash it. The opening media conference was also disrupted by heated exchanges between speakers and those supporting the climate summit being held in the northern outskirts of Paris, with ministers and officials from nearly 200 countries attending. Mr Abbott, who once said the notion that climate science was settled was "absolute crap", but as prime minister said he accepted that humans influenced the climate, had planned to attend the Paris summit before he was deposed by Mr Turnbull in September. "[Mr Abbott] had seen through this global warming thing for what it was," Lord Monckton said. "It's a very nasty totalitarian attempt to set up a kind of global system of governance."

Australian anit-coal protesters stand outside the Hotel California in Paris. Credit:Peter Hannam Lord Monckton, who is a hereditary peer but not a member of the British House of Lords, said he had prophesised Mr Abbott's demise a year before it happened because the United Nations "simply couldn't stand the idea that there would be even one stand-out" not accepting climate change was real. "I'm quite sure that without Turnbull and his own faction, the UN would have found it harder [to topple Mr Abbott]," he said. "But I think it's also naive to assume that [Mr Turnbull] has not been in contact with the UN and that they have not provided him with whatever assistance he required to achieve his objective. Former prime minister Tony Abbott. "I talked to [UN Secretary-General] Ban Ki-moon a few months ago. They know perfectly well that the climate is just a side issue; it's an excuse, a pretext. It's pseudo-moral cover to give the UN a form of supra-national, indeed global, governing power from which there will be no escape."

Lord Monckton said he met the former prime minister once, with Professor Plimer "for about 45 minutes", after Mr Abbott won the Liberal leadership in late 2009. He had subsequently remained in touch "at a distance". It's naive to assume that [Malcolm Turnbull] has not been in contact with the UN. Lord Monckton, climate sceptic He was confident, though, that Mr Abbott as prime minister would have used his influence "to moderate some of the nonsense" at the Paris summit. 'Fraud inquiries' Lord Monckton also claimed police "in various jurisdictions" were beginning to examine "downright fraudulent" behaviour on the part of climate scientists and meteorologists to fabricate the evidence of global warming.

"We have already started and that's why it's in the hands of the police in Australia," he said. "This is a quiet process. It's not something which we do very much to publicise, because you can damage the chance of a prosecution if you play this for some kind of public relations stunt." He said the target of the fraud claim was those who had claimed there was a 97 per cent consensus among peer-reviewed scientific papers that climate change was mostly caused by humans. International science agencies report that 2015 is on track to be the hottest year on record, and temperatures across the planet are on average now 1 degree warmer than in pre-industrial times. But Lord Monckton said there would also be an investigation of whether the warming scientists predict would eventuate, and whether it was cheaper to "mitigate today or adapt tomorrow".

"We wouldn't have survived 4 billion years of quite complicated and dangerous evolution if we hadn't been [so adaptive]," he said. 'Great soul' Lord Monckton said Mr Abbott's steps would have included insisting on an audit of the science and a "sunset clause", under which the UN climate apparatus would have been disbanded if the planet warmed less than one-sixth of a degree in 20 years. By contrast, Mr Turnbull would instinctively be "much more wanting to go along with the crowd, than do what Tony Abbott would do as a matter of principle". Lord Monckton said Mr Abbott was a "Mahatma – or great soul" who should rise above Australian politics and even climate change issues and devote himself to eradicating world poverty.

"I would not waste his time on the global-warming question; leave that to the likes of us who do the science, write the papers." Lord Monckton said his other research included hunting for a cure for multiple sclerosis after self-diagnosis and pharmaceutical concoctions helped solve his own crippling illness. He said he was also worried about the recent collapse of Spain's largest wind-farm operator, which he claimed was being kept hidden until the Paris climate summit was over. "[It] may yet bring down the entire European banking system with it. I hope it doesn't, but on my figures, there's a rather nasty possibility that it might," he said. Fairfax Media is a global partner of the UN Foundation.