Dan Wootton: The UN's hysterical language about climate change is designed to cause fear

Not content with terrifying us for the past 18 months over Covid, our leaders – international, political and scientific – have been back on the case today, with dire doomsday predictions of the end of the world being in sight thanks to climate change.

Now from the off, I should tell you I have been an environmentalist concerned about carbon emissions since growing up as a young boy in New Zealand scared to death about the then-depleting ozone layer. Of course, we need to protect our natural world – and in the UK that’s exactly what we have been doing, making us the most environmentally friendly country in the developed world.

We will continue to do our bit to save the environment, at a much-increased rate over the next decade. But I have two issues that I want to tackle.

First, the hysterical and purposely provocative language coming from the United Nations today via the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, like Code Red, is designed to cause fear, especially among young people, just like me three decades ago. This is straight out of the UN’s playbook.

As Guido Fawkes reported today, the UN has been predicting planetary disaster for decades, usually scheduled to happen in about a decade’s time. There’s ample proof of that.

It was way back in 1972 that Maurice Strong, the first UN Environment Programme director said that the world “had just ten years to avoid catastrophe”. Ten years later, his replacement Mostafa Tolba said we had until the turn of the millennium before dealing with “an environmental catastrophe as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust”.

As 1990 rolled around Tolba said we had just five years, “otherwise we’d lose the climate struggle”. You get the drift.

Perhaps it’s a successful PR strategy to allow leaders to convince their populations they need to spend more taxpayer money to combat climate change. But I resent the constant spreading of terror – especially given we are making plans and being at the forefront of change.

What the UN should really be doing is calling out international bad actors like China – by far the worst carbon criminal, responsible for 29.1 per cent of all emissions. But that wouldn’t be PC.

It’s far easier to target liberal democracies like the UK, where Extinction Rebellion mobs run wild.