"Right around the world, developed countries are being encouraged to put an end to subsidies for fossil fuels and invest more in renewable energy," Aly said, before citing Australia's recent refusal to sign up to a communique to end government subsidies for fossil fuels at the Paris climate change conference. Waleed Aly takes on Andrew Bolt over climate change science on The Project. Credit:Screenshot Australia declined to sign on to the statement of support last week, with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull expressing concern about the definition of a "subsidy" in the statement and arguing the country's controversial diesel fuel rebate did not constitute a subsidy. The Project host acknowledged ending the subsidies would be politically difficult in Australia, then went on to pre-empt criticism from columnist and host of The Bolt Report, Andrew Bolt, who frequently lampoons commentators and journalists, including Aly, on his blog, for their views and reporting on climate change.

A clip from Bolt's program showed the News Corp columnist flashing a graphic he uses frequently on screen to demonstrate there had been "no warming of the earth's atmosphere for around 18 years now". "Let me nip this in the bud, Andrew Bolt, before you launch into your whole 'but it has stopped warming' line that you've been running for the last few years," Aly said. "This is Carl Mears, the guy whose graph you keep using. We tracked him down, he has a message for you." The show then played a clip of Mears, a climate scientist and the vice president for research at Remote Sensing Systems, who contradicted Bolt's position and said the globe had indeed warmed in the preceding decades. "It's pretty clear that the globe has warmed over the last 18 years," said Mears. "When you do real science you can't just use the data sets that fit your pre-drawn conclusions, but you really need to look at all the data together."

Aly concluded by saying: "We can't go on denying climate change is real and we can't go on finding emotional or even incorrect reasons not to act on it. We stopped subsidising the local car industry when we realised it had no future ... if we don't stop subsidising fossil fuels, then it's us, our children, their children, whose futures will be in doubt." "Now is not the time for our leaders to just walk away." The segment was co-authored by Aly and his producer Tom Whitty. Fairfax Media