Imagine this scenario: a group of Texas secessionists travel to Europe to spread the word of ‘Texit’.

This is what happened last week. The Texas Nationalist Movement visited England and France to “offer advice and perspective on the right of self-determination and peaceful independence”.

As the group’s website reads: “TNM greatly appreciates that our opinion is valued by our liberty-minded friends in Europe.”

Spurred on by the successful Brexit vote this past summer, the Texit movement — championed by climate science denier Christopher Monckton — now hopes to inspire and advise similar movements in France, Greece, and Spain.

This cross-Atlantic cooperation highlights the growing network between British and American euro-climate sceptics.

You might have seen how climate science deniers like to compare themselves to scientific greats of the past to try to lend their arguments a degree of credibility.

One of their favourites is Galileo, the great Italian astronomer and physicist who was persecuted by the Catholic church for promoting the theory that the Sun and planets did not revolve around the Earth, but the other way around. 

Now in an example of previously uncharted overreach, one group of climate science deniers is trying to co-opt the great British naturalist Charles Darwin.

Despite Darwin having died more than 130 years ago, the newly formed and very fancy-sounding Independent Committee on Geoethics (ICG) has appointed the father of the theory of evolution by natural selection as its Honorary President.

Accredited journalists were kicked out of a sparsely attended climate denial conference hosted by the US oil-and tobacco-funded Heartland Institute today in Paris.

Heartland's ‘Day of Examining the Data’ event was repeatedly advertised as open to the public and media. However the freedom-of-speech espousing think tank had French security guards from the Hotel California outside the COP21 official venue remove DeSmog UK journalists.

Why? Because the 9 am press conference was now apparently a private event.

This DeSmog UK epic history post explains how Lord Lawson’s climate denying Global Warming Policy Foundation was actually created.

Lord Lawson in 2008 was congratulated in private for his pamphlet attacking climate science and policy by a handful of peers and MPs, mostly from the Tory party. Some even suggest he set up a new foundation to take the fight against climate mitigation to the government of the day.

At the time, there existed small, intimate groups who were furious that the Climate Change Act had become law; almost all had some relationship to Exxon- and Koch-funded think tanks in the United States, and were accepting funding from British oil and tobacco companies.