Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday said climate change is not caused by human activity, as the White House announced that US President Donald Trump would decide by next month on continued US participation in the landmark Paris agreement limiting global carbon emissions.
One day after visiting the Franz Josef Land archipelago in the Arctic, Putin said that icebergs had been melting for decades and suggested that global warming is not humans’ fault.
“The warming, it had already started by the 1930s,” Putin said in comments broadcast from an Arctic forum held in the northern Russian city of Arkhangelsk. “That’s when there were no such anthropological factors, such emissions, and the warming had already started.”
“The issue is not stopping it ... because that’s impossible, since it could be tied to some global cycles on Earth or even of planetary significance. The issue is to somehow adapt to it,” he said.
The declaration came as the White House said Trump would make his pronouncement on the Paris agreement before a meeting of G7 leaders in Sicily, Italy, that is scheduled to begin on May 26.
Putin supported his argument by saying that an Austrian explorer who had a “photographic memory” visited the archipelago “in the 1930s.”
Twenty years later the explorer was shown photographs from another expedition there “by the future king of Italy” and concluded that “there were fewer icebergs there,” Putin said.
It was not immediately clear which explorers Putin was referring to and Italy did not have a king in the 1950s.
Austrian explorer Julius von Payer discovered and mapped the archipelago during a 1872 to 1874 expedition.
The only Italian expedition to the area was organized in 1899 by Prince Luigi Amedeo, who was also an explorer.
The archipelago was declared Soviet territory by the 1930s.
Putin had previously hailed global warming for exposing natural resources and transport routes which had long been too expensive to exploit.
He had also once speculated that warming by “two or three degrees” could be a good thing for Russians, who would no longer need fur coats.
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