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The leader of Reform UK’s flagship local authority, Kent County Council has denied man-made climate change exists and mocked climate science concerning the record-breaking extreme heat over the summer, in a fiery exchange on Thursday.
Reform’s Kent County Council leader, Cllr Linden Kemkaran, was accused of dismissing widespread public concerns about the climate crisis in the council chamber.
The outburst occurred during a meeting of the full council in Maidstone, after Councillor Stuart Heaver (Green Party) asked Cllr Kemkaran if she had any second thoughts about the Council rescinding the KCC Climate Emergency Declaration, given the scale of heat-related deaths over the summer.
Cllr Heaver noted UK Health Security Agency figures showing a significant increase on the 1,504 excess deaths observed in summer 2025 this year. Over 2,800 people have died in England and Wales due to record-breaking extreme heat over the summer, according to the official estimates.
Kent Fire and Rescue service attended more than 130 grass fires since July, and 2026 is on track to be the worst harvest since records began.
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The leader simply replied: “No.”
When pressed to expand on her answer, she was accused of “reeling off a list of debunked climate denial claims” by the Greens.
She told the chamber: “I will inject some much needed common sense into this conversation.”
She added: “Grass fires are not caused by an increase in temperature, but rather issues such as arson, poor land management practice, etc.”
While most UK wildfires are started by people rather than by the weather itself, what turns a spark into a serious fire is the condition of the vegetation, and that is driven by heat and drought. This summer much of the country was a dry tinderbox, with fires far more likely to combust and spread due to the extreme heat.
A Met Office study found that the damaging fires during the UK’s record-breaking (at that point) 2022 heatwave were made at least six times more likely due to human-caused climate change.
The Reform leader then stated a list of debunked claims as fact.
She said: “[Greens] forget that the climate is always changing. It always has and it always will change. In Roman and mediaeval times the earth was two degrees warmer than it is today, for example. The earth is actually coming out of a mini ice age, Mr Chairman. There is only one way for temperatures to go.”
The climate does change through history, but humans are now the overwhelming driver of temperature increases.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is clear that “human influence on climate has been the dominant cause of observed warming since the mid-20th century.”
Glaciologist Jeff Severinghaus has told Carbon Brief that arguing natural change rules out human-caused change is “like saying that forest fires cannot be set by careless campers because lightning also causes forest fires.”
On her claim about “Roman and medieval times”, this is strongly disputed by most of the academic literature. The IPCC has found that in the last decade, global average surface temperatures have been higher than any multi-century average in the past 11,700 years (the Holocene). While there were warm periods in the eras that Cllr Kemkaran referred to, they were not global, and they were not 2°C warmer than today.
A major 2019 Nature Geoscience study found: “The largest warming trends at timescales of 20 years and longer occur during the second half of the 20th century, highlighting the unusual character of the warming in recent decades.”
Cllr Kemkaran’…