SCOTLAND’S “mainstream” must unite to tackle climate change in the face of an “ever-stronger pushback” from the political right, the First Minister said today.

SNP leader John Swinney made the remarks as US President Donald Trump vowed to clamp down on what he termed the “climate extremism” of driving down carbon emissions, and Reform UK MP Richard Tice pledged to “undo the effects of net zero” with a windfall tax on renewable energy.

Mr Swinney condemned the “ever-stronger pushback against the very idea of a climate crisis and the very need to act.”

He argued that that reactions against measures to cut carbon emissions such as reducing car use and so-called 15-minute cities were “based on arguments that not only fly in the face of the science but that fly in the face of reality.”

The First Minister told an audience of academics and nature and wildlife organisations, at Kibble Palace in Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens, that he wanted to meet that challenge and “mobilise the middle, the mainstream, against the ever more strident calls for climate inaction from the right.”

Citing the recent Storm Eowyn, whose 100mph winds cut a swathe across the country last month, he insisted: “It is not something that is happening over there, safely out of sight and out of mind.

“As we saw with Storm Eowyn, climate change is happening here and now, in real time, with direct and damaging effects in our own towns, in our own countryside, in people’s everyday lives.”

In a final plea, he argued that facing the anti-science threat, it was more necessary than ever to “unite for a fundamental purpose — to make a renewed case for the value, for the necessity, of climate action itself.”