Barnaby Joyce says the idea Australia can stop climate change is “barking mad”, and global warming is a better problem than the next ice age.

The former Nationals leader once famously warned Australians they could pay $150 for a lamb roast, as a result of Julia Gillard’s carbon tax.

Contrary to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate report, Mr Joyce is warning the climate change crisis campaign is overblown and says the push to reduce carbon emissions is pointless.

“The very idea that we can stop climate change is barking mad. Climate change is inevitable, as geology has always shown,” Mr Joyce said in a Facebook post.

My Joyce said the push to reduce emissions is pointless. Photo: Getty

“These are the views of New Zealand lecturer of geology David Shelley – a person vastly more competent than me – and the flotilla of others telling the kids the world is going to end from global warming.

“The central theme of David Shelley’s analysis is that sea levels are rising and have been for thousands of years and will fall during the next ice age, which is expected about now, give or take a thousand years.

“When the ice age does arrive temperatures will drop around 10 degrees. A warmer planet will be a disconsolate chronicle and many, maybe most, will die from starvation as is the usual experience of man or beast in previous ice ages.”

Mr Joyce suggested we may come to look back on global warming as a better problem compared with freezing to death.

“The weather is going to brutally win the population problem and the Parliament of Australia has no power against it. One may suggest that warmer weather is the better problem of the two,” he said.

A station near Parkes after NSW was declared 100 per cent drought affected. Photo: AAP

“One of the few graces of being on the backbench is you can be honest with what your views really are. I believe this is one of the greatest policy phantoms, the misguided and quite ludicrous proposition that Australia can have any effect on the climate.

“If we could, we should be the first to make it rain and, more importantly, stop the recurrence of an ice age any time in the coming millennium.”

Mr Joyce said even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had conceded that: “In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible”.

“You don’t get the feeling when you listen to the political propaganda or the supporting lobbyists that there is any doubt about their capacity to ‘fix the climate problem’,” he said.

“I do get the feeling that you will be tried for heresy if you dare question the zeitgeist, so you basically have to lie about your honest assessment of what the hell we are doing to our economy, standard of living, our basic rights and the real future of our children.

Mr Joyce said global warming might be better than freezing to death. Photo: AAP

“Private property rights are removed, by the implementation of vegetation laws, because of ‘climate action’. The state will limit your access to electricity because of ‘climate action’. You will drive an electric car because of ‘climate action’. You will divest the nation of its largest export because of ‘climate action’.

“I hate to say it but I doubt the majority of people on the planet don’t give a toss about the Paris Agreement. I would be amazed if one per cent of the planet could competently explain it.”

On the same day Mr Joyce’s post came to light, renowned environmentalist Sir David Attenborough told British MPs he found it “extraordinary” that politicians in Australia continue to deny climate change.

During the federal election, the former Labor leader Bill Shorten called Prime Minister Scott Morrison a “coal-wielding, climate-denying cave dweller”.

But Mr Morrison said he accepted the science of climate change.

“It’s important to have a balance in your emissions reductions policies. You’ve got to have the cool head as well as the passionate heart,” Mr Morrison said.