Those who thought Al Gore's visit to Trump Tower in December was a good sign for the Trump administration's commitment to combating climate change might have another thing coming. Experts who doubt the validity of global warming are pretty excited about President Trump.

"Nothing has made me prouder than the fact that Donald Trump is now president," said Steven Milloy, a bio-statistician who runs the website Junk Science, a website that seeks to debunk scientific findings.

Milloy presented with a handful of other climate change critics in a session at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C., on Thursday.

He predicted the administration will "turn loose" the American energy industry, though he admitted it might not be easy.

"It's going to be a real war with environmentalists, there's no question about that," he said. "But we're going to move the EPA in the right direction."

New agency head Scott Pruitt has made a name for himself by suing the Environmental Protection Agency as Oklahoma's attorney general.

Milloy, who said he was part of Trump's EPA transition team, also believes the United States will drop out of the Paris climate agreement and could potentially back out of the United States Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), signed in 1992. Also on Thursday, more than 300 scientists sent a letter to Trump urging him to withdraw from the UNFCCC.

Tony Heller, who blogs under the pseudonym Steven Goddard at "Real Science," delivered a presentation on what he says is fake news on climate change. One of the many graphs he showed was titled "Fake Human Attribution for Sea Level Rise."

"This is not science, this is just fake news," he said.

Opening up the panel, James Delingpole, a British columnist who currently works at Breitbart, argued that "control freaks" have been drawn to the environmental movement.

He discussed his role in the Climate Research Unit email controversy, coined "Climategate," during which over 1,000 private emails between climate change scientists were published online. He was first to break the story in 2009 and on Thursday bragged it was "the greatest scientific scandal in history."

Such a celebration of Trump's election among climate-change questioners may be cause for consternation among those worried about the future of the planet. But the president has signaled he plans to take a pro-energy, less-than-environmentally-friendly approach.

Prior to his election, Trump on more than one occasion declared that climate change is a Chinese hoax.

Since his inauguration, Trump has sent signals that he will prioritize business and short-term economic growth over combatting climate change and protecting the environment.

He signed legislation ending a coal mining rule under the Obama administration aimed at protecting waterways. He is also reportedly preparing executive orders that will ease regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, federal coal leasing and water protection.

Pruitt will address the CPAC on Saturday, where he will likely provide more guidance on where the Trump administration is headed on environmental regulation and on any action on climate change.