Fox News Guest Says Efforts to Address Climate Change Through Paris Agreement are 'Medieval Witchcraft'

Efforts to address climate change with the Paris Agreement amount to "medieval witchcraft" a guest on Fox & Friends said Tuesday.

"It's been called the most expensive treaty in world history with a price tag of upwards of $100 trillion, a global cost of $1 to $2 trillion annually, and, again, you mentioned this two degree thing, and I actually point out this was -- The authors of this two degree target actually admit it was, quote, pulled from thin air, the scientists in the United Nations admit this," Marc Morano, director of communications for nonprofit Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, said while appearing on the show. "So -- and then even The Washington Post has acknowledged that, even if you're afraid of global warming, the U.N. Paris Agreement would basically do nothing, has no impact on the climate. This is medieval witchcraft to think that we can all come together with some treaty, make a bunch of pledges, and have a temperature a hundred years that's different."

Media Matters described Morano as a "climate denier."

"I think that the two degree target was chosen more for political reasons than for true scientific reasons," Columbia University professor Scott Barrett, who served on the U.N. Climate Panel, told PBS NewsHour in 2015. "The idea was to — if countries could agree on a collective target, that that would mobilize the action needed to get the whole world to act together."

Studies have shown that if the planet warms 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the impacts will be devastating. A landmark report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was released in October, warned that a global temperature increase above 1.5 degrees Celsius will exacerbate the danger of climate-driven disasters.

Vox noted that an increase of 2 degrees Celsius will lead to increased heat waves, decreased freshwater availability, rising sea levels and coral bleaching.

Despite the scientific evidence behind climate change and consensus among the scientific community, skeptics have appeared on Fox News and CNN to dispute the anthropogenic trend.

Critics of the Paris Agreement have noted Morano's argument about the ability for the Paris Agreement to enact change. After the announcement of the international accord -- which Trump withdrew from in 2017 -- critics argued that it lacked legal enforceability.

In December, nations at the COP24 conference agreed on a set of rules detailing how countries will track emissions. But experts still expressed concern about the pace of progress.

"My biggest concern is that the UN talks failed to align ambitions with science," Johan Rockstrom, the director designate at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told The Guardian. "We continue to follow a path that will take us to a very dangerous 3-4C warmer world within this century. Extreme weather events hit people across the planet already, at only 1C of warming."