Tim Yeo, the chairman of the Commons Energy and Climate Change committee, said he accepts the earth’s temperature is increasing but said “natural phases” may be to blame.

Such a suggestion sits at odds with the scientific consensus. One recent survey of 12,000 academic papers on climate change found 97 per cent agree human activities are causing the planet to warm.

As an aside, can I just point out to the learned journalist at the Telegraph that there is quite a lot of ground between "humans to blame" and "humans not to blame". There are at least fifty shades of "humans partly to blame".