Whether it's Scott Wagner saying that climate change is happening because we're moving closer to the Sun or the President of the United States saying that the global trend of climate change isn't real because it's a bit nippy in Texas, our elected leaders appear to be quite confused about climate science. And just science in general.

Australian politicians, even though they're living through a record-breaking heatwave, are no different. We thought maybe the science denial in the lead-up to the Australian elections had peaked yesterday when Gerard Rennick claimed that the weather bureau was “rewriting weather records to fit in with the global warming agenda" and that "Our public servants are out of control”. But no. In swoops One Nation's founder and leader Pauline Hanson with some of the dumbest stuff we've heard all year.

In an interview with The Today Show, Hanson supported her argument that human-made climate change isn't real because we didn't kill off the dinosaurs.

"This has been a fact of life right from the time that Earth was here in place, that we’ve been going through climate changes on Earth," she said in the widely mocked interview. "There was once an ice age, there was once a flood throughout Australia here, water, it was all through Central Australia. People weren’t around at that time, we didn’t have the industrialists here in this country at that time.

"What happened to the dinosaurs, how did they die off? Humans didn’t create it."

As many people have pointed out to her, what happened to the dinosaurs is that a giant asteroid hit Earth 66 million years ago, burning forests and producing enough soot to block out the Sun for years, creating a "nuclear winter" effect.

After the initial nuclear winter, the CO₂ likely remained trapped in the atmosphere when the Sun came back out, making temperatures exceptionally high for 100,000 years. If the impact taught us anything, it's that we need to deal with CO₂ emissions if we don't want to join the dinosaurs. 

"If climate change is happening it's not because man is causing it to happen," she went on to say, as though there's a gigantic asteroid strike that we missed that's been heating our planet since the Industrial Revolution.

Quite why she thinks the impact that killed the dinosaurs is proof that human-made climate change is not real is unclear. In the same interview, she goes on to say that "they've fiddled with facts and figures" on temperatures and that the idea that climate change is real "has been man-made". Which goes against her previous argument of 10 seconds ago that CO₂ levels and temperatures are rising, but it's due to "volcano eruptions that spew out more carbon emissions and even the oceans do".

It's not the first time she's said something ridiculous, she also wants to pull out of the Paris Agreement, and this won't be the last. But at least with her poll numbers falling, it might be that voters are finally getting sick of it.