Despite the record-breaking temperatures, Mark Robinson still denies climate science.

The leading Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina, the current NC Lt. Governor Mark Robinson, has staked himself out as an absolute denier of the reality of climate change.

Most opponents of effective action to address the climate crisis have increasingly found it necessary to modulate their message. Instead of denying that disasters are happening, they argue for ineffective half-measures, or unworkable approaches designed to protect their friends in the power companies and fossil fuel industry. They’ve stopped trying to deny that dangerous change is underway.

Not Robinson. He says the mounting climate disasters slapping us in the collective face are not real, that alarming global temperature rise isn’t happening, and that scientists and educators who state otherwise are “liars.”

“We have now allowed those folks to dictate what we do based on pseudoscience, junk science that has not proven a single solitary thing,” Robinson said last month during a speech in Hickory. “These people that are at the college telling your young people that it’s the climate change is gonna kill us all … these people, I’m gonna say it right now, they are liars. Liars.”

This approach is standard Robinson. He comes from and unabashedly speaks for the most extreme views on the political far right. His surprise win in the 2020 Republican primary for lieutenant governor was fueled by a viral video of his fiery speech to a Greensboro City Council meeting, in which he railed against any restrictions on guns. He has openly threatened to use his own guns on any government officials who “get too big for [their] britches.” In the 2020 election, his rhetoric and extremism struck a responsive chord with primary voters who love the Trump approach to politics. In a fractured primary field, he carried the plurality, and won office in the statewide near-sweep for the Republican ticket that fall.

Since his election, he has further endeared himself to the social far-right by his relentless attacks on LGBTQ people. He is also an anti-abortion absolutist; and like Trump, has managed to maintain the enthusiasm of anti-choice voters despite revelations of his personal past inconsistency on that issue.

Thus far, Robinson’s attacks have proven popular with a strong plurality of the Republican base voters in the state, and that popularity has immunized him against controversy with that base. When he finds it convenient, he simply uses the technique of denying that he meant what he said and ridiculing those who assume otherwise. As in 2020, in 2024 he again faces a fractured field of primary opponents, in which he could easily win with well below majority support.

That would place him one election away from becoming the Governor of North Carolina—and personally becoming another disaster in the growing string of climate disasters.