A blaze in New South Wales re-ignited a climate debate last week when Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott told reporters that linking the unseasonable bushfire to climate change was “complete hogwash.”

The proclamation is the latest in a series of alarming climate stances taken by Abbott’s government since he took over in September. Other climate-unfriendly actions include dismantling the Australian Climate Commission and working to repeal the carbon and mining taxes imposed by the previous administration.

The hogwash indictment was preceded earlier that week by a radio interview in which Abbott accused the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change of “talking through her hat” when she linked the NSW fires with extreme temperatures, according to The Guardian.

“Fire is part of the Australian experience … it has been since humans were on this continent,” The Guardian quotes Abbot as saying. “Climate change is real … but these fires are certainly not a function of climate change, they are just a function of life.”

Environment Minister Greg Hunt backed up the prime minister, saying specific events cannot be linked to climate change, according to the Associated Press.

Many climate scientists, including those with the International Governmental Panel on Climate Change, estimate that climate change is increasing the probability of extreme fires such as Australia’s one in New South Wales.

Indeed, while the NSW fire, which destroyed hundreds of homes in the Blue Mountains roughly 50 miles west of Sydney, isn’t necessarily linked to climate change, the conditions that led to it and nearly 65 other bushfires are, according to Andy Pitman, director of the Australian Research Council’s Center of Excellence for Climate System Science.

“The questions are more around whether global warming is increasing the risk of bush fires, did global warming make the recent fires more likely and therefore whether there is a global warming link to the fires in the Blue Mountains,” he wrote in an explanatory post on the Center website on Friday.

Pitman listed several factors that confirm the climate-fire connection, including increased temperatures (the month leading up to the fires was the hottest September on record in the country), increased fuel loads, and increased populations in vulnerable areas.

The posture of the Abbott government is especially concerning because of the inherent risk of more extreme fires, said Lesley Hughes, an ecologist at Macquarie University and a member of the Climate Council, a nonprofit group that sprung from the defunded Australian Climate Commission.

“It is crucial for the public, emergency service workers and health workers to be able to prepare for more of this type of extreme weather,” she told The Guardian on Friday. “To deny the influence of climate change on extreme fire weather, and not take appropriate action to prepare for these changed conditions, places people and property at unnecessarily high risk.”

Abbott has said multiple times that he believes climate change is a reality, but he recently told the Washington Post that the discussion has become “far too theological for anyone’s good,” and that “there is too much climate-change alarmism.”

That level of skepticism raised international concerns and his government’s other climate-impacting decisions—especially the planned repeal of a tax on CO2 emissions—have drawn criticism from the UN, nearby Pacific island nations, and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. National concerns are similar, although tinged with chagrin.

“Tony Abbott is making Australia an international laughing stock by continuing to deny the link between climate change and the probability of extreme bushfire conditions,” said Christine Milne, leader of Australia’s Green Party, told The Guardian. “The biggest sources of climate hogwash in Australia are our prime minister and environment minister. They are an embarrassment. It would be laughable if it were not so serious.”