Many might want to believe the United Nations, a world political mediation body created in the aftermath of World War 2, would be a friend of climate science since they are the governing body behind the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - but they are instead advocates.
  
When advocates take center stage and make cringe-worthy statements over and over again, they actually hurt the science they are advocating.   The UN has said baffling things to such an extent they have hurt the reputation of climate science, resulting in backlash about climate change because no one knows what to believe any more.
   
Melting Himalayas and other grey literature published as fact can be dismissed as zealotry in an IPCC working group but in the midst of climate warming hysteria - 2005 - the UN itself made some rather silly projections that have come back to haunt them.

The UN and its The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) made a prediction that by 2010 there would be 50 million “climate refugees” by, of all dates, 2010.  2010 may have seemed like a comfortable number in 2005, since Al Gore was saying we were doomed in 10 years back then.  They even produced a handy map showing where all of the people forced to leave home due to bad weather would come from.  

The map has, not surprisingly, been purged in as many places as the UN can purge it, though plenty of people have looked at census data to see if this climate Exodus occurred and are now making goat noises at the UN over it.  GRID-Arendal, an official United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) collaborating center, took it down, saying that graphic and information were produced as an "environmental Atlas" for Le Monde neewspaper and was not meant to be, you know, believed.    Oy vey.  

But Google is kind enough to cache things on the Internet, so here it is for posterity.  You have to click to see it in any meaningful way because it's the whole world:



Obviously a number of climate scientists aren't going to be happy about more fodder for skeptics and outright deniers, but the days of circling the wagons around advocates with agendas is long gone.  Climate scientists should have been policing their own and deriding this stuff the same way biologists and physicists would correct (and ridicule) hard science claims about silly speculation.

Exxon could not have spent $100 million dollars and achieved the kind of credibility undermining done by people claiming to be friends of science.   Rather than let the UN and its political bodies continue to set back real environmental reform, climate scientists need to create their own body and avoid the IPCC political gerrymandering method of throwing out anyone who disagrees.     Get climate science back from politicians and advocates.  That would be a great Earth Day present for the world.  The environment is too important to let the UN risk by making science look stupid any longer.