Now, Southland National MP Joseph Mooney is not answering questions about his views on climate change after seeking feedback from the student on research that has been labelled "a long way removed from mainstream climate science".
Mr Mooney was approached by University of Otago student Matt Greene at a Dunedin student event several weeks ago.
Mr Greene, a first year master’s student and a Green Party member, approached him to raise his concerns the government was not addressing climate change with the urgency needed.
After their conversation both men left with scientific articles the other had suggested reading.
Mr Greene asked the MP to read "The 2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory", which is part of a series of yearly updates on climate change.
Mr Mooney sought the student’s views on a paper, published in an engineering sciences journal, titled "Climatic consequences of the process of saturation of radiation absorption in gases".
Upon reading the article the following day Mr Greene became alarmed.
"It’s just absolutely bunk," he said. "I don’t want to make this a personal attack on an MP, but I would just really like him to publicly say, ‘Yeah, that’s not my belief; that’s not my opinion.’
"I don’t think that it’s good enough ... as a sitting MP going, ‘Oh, what do you think about this climate denialism paper?’ — when the science has been settled for just so long and we’ve announced a climate emergency as a country.
"I was quite alarmed by it."
In order to establish whether the paper was credible the Otago Daily Times independently sought the views of University of Otago senior lecturer Dr Daniel Kingston on the paper.
Dr Kingston raised concerns.
While radiation physics was not his specific area of expertise, he was familiar enough with climate change science in general to offer a view, he said.
"Specifically, I would say that the conclusions from this paper are a long way removed from mainstream climate science.
"There is a substantial body of research that does not align with the conclusions from this paper, and the concept of CO₂ saturation as discussed here has been strongly refuted.
"In other words, adding more CO₂ to the atmosphere will almost certainly cause more warming — i.e. the opposite of what this paper concludes."
The ODT presented the student’s and the senior lecturer’s concerns to Mr Mooney and asked him to explain why he brought the paper to the attention of a student.
The ODT asked whether he had a view on the paper’s conclusions, whether he believed in man-made climate change and whether the climate change debate was settled.
After several attempts to get a response, Mr Mooney replied, but did not answer the questions directly.
"I was approached by this student," Mr Mooney said.
"I did not recommend this paper or any other.
"I was simply having a discussion with him and in sharing the paper it was not an intent to endorse its conclusions as I made clear to him at the time and later by email."
Hansard excerpts show Mr Mooney has addressed climate change during debate.
In 2022, he rejected a Green Party claim the National Party did not care about climate change.
"The National Party very much cares about it and we’ve worked hard on this for many years" Mr Mooney said at the time.
"However, we need to have a system that will actually balance our climate change mitigation responsibilities and ensure we don’t have what’s called emissions leakage, which means sending emissions offshore, which will increase the planetary emissions profile, which, unfortunately, is what we’re looking at at the moment," he said.
Former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern declared a climate emergency in 2020.
