Arguments
Factcheck: Reform UK’s 45 false or misleading claims about climate and energy
Posted on 14 September 2026 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Carbon Brief by Josh Gabbatiss, Daisy Dunne, Molly Lempriere, Dr Simon Evans
Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, has emerged as a major force in UK politics in recent years – pushing anti-net-zero policies, alongside vehement opposition to immigration.
The hard-right populist party is currently mired in a funding controversy and only has a handful of MPs, yet, until recently, it had been leading in national polls for more than a year.
As seen with many similar parties across Europe and beyond, a rejection of climate science is central to Reform’s ideological outlook.
Richard Tice, the party’s deputy leader, is a vocal critic of what he calls “net stupid zero” and has incorrectly blamed “the sun or volcanoes” for human-caused global warming.
As Reform’s energy spokesperson, Tice has also been clear that, if the party were ever to form a national government, it would scrap the UK’s net-zero target, support fossil-fuel expansion and tear up existing contracts for renewable energy.
While less vocal on the subject, Farage has, nevertheless, expressed climate-sceptic views and falsely blamed net-zero policies for the “deindustrialisation of Britain”.
These views draw on long-standing, inaccurate climate-sceptic narratives and are reflected in Reform’s election manifestos, its actions in local government and the opinions of many of its supporters.
Here, Carbon Brief gathers together by topic and factchecks 45 false or misleading claims made by the party’s leadership relating to climate change, renewables and net-zero.
Climate science
FALSE
Tice: “There’s no evidence that man-made CO2 is going to change climate change…The Norwegian government’s own equivalent of our ONS [Office of National Statistics] has recently produced a report along the lines of what I’m saying.”
Sky News, February 2025
The world’s authority on climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), says it is “unequivocal” that humans have warmed the planet, primarily through releasing greenhouse gases.
The IPCC says that, due to human activities, concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) “have increased at rates that have no precedent on centennial timescales in at least the past 800,000 years”.
It adds that concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are now higher than they have been for at least the past two million years.
The report that Tice is referring to is by two independent authors, with Statistics Norway clarifying in 2024 that their views are “not the official stance” of the statistics bureau. (It has also not been formally peer reviewed.)
A factcheck of the Norwegian report by a climate scientist for RealClimate describes it as “misguided” and a “distraction due to errors”.
Another factcheck published by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology found it “contains standard talking-points of climate denial”.
MISLEADING
Tice: “Look, the climate’s always changed for millions of years. And it goes through cycles, long, medium and short.”
Bloomberg, May 2026
Global temperatures are currently around 1.4C hotter than when the industrial era first began in 1850-1900, as shown in the figure below.
The IPCC says that this amount of warming is likely to have made Earth hotter than at any time in about 125,000 years.
Data from NASA GISTEMP, NOAA GlobalTemp, Hadley/UEA HadCRUT5, Berkeley Earth, Copernicus ERA5, JRA-3Q, DCENT, and China-MST. Temperature records are aligned over the 1981-2010 period and use the WMO approach to calculate warming relative to pre-industrial levels (1850-1900).
Scientists overwhelmingly agree that approximately 100% of this warming has been caused by humans.
There are also natural influences that can affect Earth’s climate on shorter timescales, such as El Niño events, volcanic eruptions and small variations in the output of the sun. However, scientists have found that these have only a limited effect on the underlying trend of long-term global warming.
When looking at longer timescales of millions of years or more, Earth has experienced multiple ice ages interspersed with warmer periods.
These changes in climate were triggered by variations in Earth’s orbit around the sun, in combination with subtle fluctuations in the tilt and rotation of the planet, over tens of thousands of years. However, the resulting changes to CO2 levels in the atmosphere also played a role.
This should serve as a “cautionary example”, according to Dr Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and Carbon Brief contributor, “because human emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases push the Earth further out of the range of climate conditions that have characterised the past few million years”.
FALSE
Tice: “The idea that you can stop the power of the sun or volcanoes is simply ludicrous.”
BBC Breakfast, June 2024
Scientists overwhelmingly agree that humans have caused 100% of recent climate change.
Tice’s suggestion that the sun or volcanic eruptions are behind current warming is false.
As the video below explains, the sun and volcanic eruptions have little bearing on the long-term trend of global temperature rise since the Industrial Revolution.
Yes, I started to read the rest but such old debunked crap spewed out by corrupt elites was too much to finish. At least my increasing doomerism was called out by a positive and plain speaking "Belle". www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhSBPVr_h4s
Prove @1 :
Yes, "Reform-UK" is a waste of time, regarding climate politics.
Have to agree about Youtube's "Belle of the Ranch" ~ who I find very informative on various U.S.A./political events.
"Belle" puts out 2 or 3 brief videos per day, typically about 4 minutes long. An intelligent woman, with a dry & droll sense of humour ~ and she seems to have good sources of information..
The videos are shot in a shed (carrying on her husband's tradition ~ and he himself has a past list of similarly intelligent commentaries, under the title of "Beau of the Fifth Column", IIRC.)
"Belle" nowadays presents as Farmer's Wife & past Military Nurse. The folksy Southern Drawl, baseball hat, and checked shirts go with the package!
Definitely good for brief updates on major current events.
The source of the OP above, CarbonBrief, is a UK-based organisaton so for non-UK readers (and perhaps a few UK readers as well) a quick** bit of ReformUK background may be useful. (**That is as quick as I can manage -I am a UK political activist.)
ReformUK has been quite a phenomenon within UK politics in the last few years. It is the creation of Nigel Farage who has campaigned on the far-right since 1991. Initially it was a single issue - leaving the EU and his vehicle was a party called UKIP (UK Independence Party). It had no success outside the low-turnout elections for the EU parliament when the issue would fire up right-wing Tory voters enough to go out and vote UKIP or Tory when others stayed home. (UKIP got a quarter of the 2014 vote, the biggest share but not far above the two big parties.)
Particularly during the Brexit referendum Farage found his dictats hindered by rival factions undermining him. And in following years he was plagued by many wanting to turn the party further to the right and adopt toxic policies. So he left UKIP and formed the Brexit Party at the start of 2019. Farage actually owned this party which was incorporated as a private company. Farage was the major shareholder with a couple of other shareholders including millionaire Richard Tice who was the main financier.
The new party yopped the vote and gained over a third of the vote in the May 2019 EU parliament elections, this amid the turmoil of negotiating the EU exit. Both main parties did badly (a sign of things to come) but it was all rather silly with the UK on the verge of its EU exit.
Back in the real world, the Brexit Party got just 2% in the UK General Election later (December) that year.
A month later, the UK legally left the EU (Jan 2020) and a year later Farage left politics, his job done. Tice became leader of the party which had become re-named ReformUK although Farage was still the party's legal owner. It slowly gained support and with the Tories floundering, ReformUK had gained about 10% support as the next General Election drew near. It was called for July 2024.
Then six weeks out from that election Farage returned to lead ReformUK again. (We now learn he was peronally gifted £5million by backers, perhaps payment to induce him to return.) They got a bit of a boost in popularity (14%) but not enough to deliver more than a handful of MPs. Importantly, while the Labour Party got a massive majority but did not 'win' the vote - it was ReformUK splitting the right wing vote that delivered for them.
It was quite evident that Labour would win and soon lose support, just as the Tories did in government. This was shown in the local electons of 2025 & 2026 which got Labour into a panic. The change in Labour leadership this year has reversed that slide although ReformUK were already losing support (from last autumn) and today have dropped significant popularity (25% down from 32%).
The challenge Farage and ReformUK was always going to appear in a General Election. They certainly would not gain a majority in individual constituencies and their toxicity will result in massive tactical voting - their main opponent in each seat being supported by all to block ReformUK winning. This doesn't happen in local elections which also have lower turnouts (like the old EU parliament elections). And in parliament, MPs of all ilk aren't gonna support them being in government.
So a ReformUK government has always looked unlikely, and increasingly so as their true nature becomes plain (rather than being seen as a 'breath of fresh air'). The problem ReformUK pose is that they will continue to command significant support and other parties (mainly the Tories) will attempt to grab some of that support by adopting ReformUK policies. (This was how we got the stupid Breixt referendum in 2016.) And one of those policies now being readily adopted is the trashing of Net Zero targets and insisting high energy bills and disappearing industries are a result of said Net Zero targets.