The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced in a new report that the world has just 12 years to make drastic and changes — “unprecedented in terms of scale” — to reduce global warming or we will suffer an irreversible climate catastrophe. As if we needed just one more apocalyptic warning to finally believe these Chicken Littles.

Remember, this UN report comes just 12 years after Al Gore declared we had 10 years left to save the planet. And 36 years after the UN itself said we had 20 years.

This latest doomsday scenario claims that if the nations of the world don’t take major steps to reduce carbon emissions, we will miss the last opportunity to reduce rising temperatures, basically signing humanity’s death warrant.

No really; they mean it this time!

The New York Times is appalled … at President Donald Trump. “A day after the United Nations issued its most urgent call to arms yet for the world to confront the threat of climate change, President Trump boarded Air Force One for Florida — a state that lies directly in the path of this coming calamity — and said nothing about it,” the Times harrumphed in an editorial masquerading as a news report.

The UN report calls for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over the next 10 years. In order to reach this goal, of course, governments must make “rapid and far-reaching” changes to their energy industries by switching to renewable energy sources and phasing out global coal production, while forcing automotive companies to ramp up production of electric cars. Several nations already want to ban combustion engines by 2040; California Democrats do too.

It’s a long shot that the nations of the world can reduce carbon emissions by one million tons a year, so the UN report conveniently notes that a brief overshoot of the temperature goal will still put us on track to save the planet, so long as everyone sticks to the overall plan.

This latest climate report follows the leftist game plan to use climate change as a path to global socialism, to bring sovereign governments and the international economy to heel under a Marxist cabal that would dictate what countries can manufacture and what people can purchase and how, or if, they travel.

The climate alarmism of the Left goes back decades, and it has always been tied to forcing people to change their behavior in a manner that suits the leftist worldview.

In the 1970s, we were told that overpopulation and a coming ice age would deplete our resources and cause massive starvation. The solution was for First World middle- and upper-class people to stop having children and consuming resources. In the 1980s, global warming became the new culprit with the claim that our coastal cities would all be underwater by the turn of the century. The cure? Massive price and tax hikes for First World energy producers and consumers to convince them to reduce their “carbon footprint.”

Why should the United States pay such a high price for global warming? Of all the nations that are signatories to the Paris climate accord, America is the only one that has actually reduced carbon emissions. And, of course, we’re the only signatory to withdraw, just as Trump promised. Yet most of the solutions that scientists propose to “fix” the problem disproportionately target the capitalist U.S., leaving communist China — the world’s largest polluter — alone.

In every instance, a large number of climate scientists have, either willingly or without realizing it, tried to advance the agenda of the Left. Some have admitted to manipulating data to enhance the danger. Others simply trash the reputations of any colleague who dares question the gospel of global warming. Reasoned debate and research, the backbone of good science, has no room when the real goal is to force a particular outcome or behavior upon the people.

Everyone suffers in this climate of fear. When UN panels, universities, and hustlers like Gore lay out doomsday scenarios and use cooked data to warn of “last chances” and “tipping points” to stop the apocalypse, how is the public supposed to know what is true and what is false about global warming? Environmentalists appear puzzled that people aren’t more concerned about the issue. Perhaps they would be more attentive if they weren’t being lied to so brazenly.