Well, I hope I can cheer everybody up with my little speech because the motion starts with one of the most spectacularly silly statements you could imagine: that the world's scientific community says that there are just 12 years left to prevent 1.5 degrees of warming. I'm old enough to remember the invention of the environment as a political issue at the end of the 1960s, and indeed the very first United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization conference on Earth Day in 1970. And it's very entertaining to look back at the predictions that were made at that conference, including one from ecologist Kenneth Watt, who warned about the impending ice age in a speech:

'The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years', he declared, and, 

'If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.'