NASA said the crash was ''extremely disappointing''. Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, dubbed the ''high priest of climate sceptics'', doubts the space agency meant it.

''Not greatly to my surprise - indeed I predicted it - the satellite crashed on take-off because the last thing they want is real world hard data,'' he told a climate sceptics' lunch in Melbourne yesterday.

NASA understood that getting the satellite into orbit would have demonstrated ''the whole darn thing'' - climate-change science - ''is nonsense''.

Bold claims are stock-in-trade for Lord Monckton, a hereditary peer and one-time adviser to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who swung through Melbourne yesterday as part of a two-week national speaking tour.

He said he was the first to explain the theory of global warming on British television in the late 1980s; that the United Nations wanted to use climate change policy to create a world government; that today's environmentalists were just yesterday's communists in different clothing.

His biggest laugh at the first of his two Melbourne speeches came when he said describing environmentalists as ''green'' was a misnomer. ''I tend to call them the traffic-light tendency - greens too yellow to admit they're really red.''

His interests stretch beyond climate change. He makes the extraordinary claim, one that he admits sounds ''bonkers'', that he has also manufactured a cure to a long-term illness that attacked his endocrine system and patented the cure in conjunction with a British surgeon.

Though stressing it was in its early stages, he said the drug had had positive results treating HIV and multiple sclerosis. ''It also has been used to cure cases of colds, flu,'' he said.

Lord Monckton's stump speech is built around attacks on the science underpinning man-made climate change and the scientists and those that believe them. Though not a climate scientist, he said he had uncovered flaws through his understanding of mathematics - ''the language of science''.