Persecuted and Paralysed: <sup/> Climate Scepticism Between Greenhouse Physics and Populist Politics in Hungary

This study explores the history and scientific foundations of the Hungarian climate change sceptic movement in the literature and media coverage to determine the movement’s potential influence on national climate politics. We demonstrate how personal factors, relationships, motivations and anti-environmentalist attitudes have shaped the movement, and how an alternative greenhouse effect theory has influenced its rise. An analysis of this alternative theory reveals a lack of authentic debate, which fuels the sceptical movement; however, theory supporters find themselves in a peculiar position because neither international sceptics nor the Hungarian right-wing, populist government has promoted the theory. These circumstances reveal a particular science-policy relationship that demonstrates the heterogeneous character of populism. Although the government did not explicitly use climate change scepticism as propaganda to dominate public discourse or attack the EU, there were signs that they viewed this as a possibility. The situation could have been further changed but they lost the parliamentary elections in April 2026. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .