PARIS - Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg on Tuesday lashed out at the abuse she receives for speaking out over global warming, after a visit to France's parliament provoked a backlash from right-wing deputies.

Some right-wing MPs boycotted the impassioned speech at the National Assembly by Thunberg, whose school strikes protesting government inaction over climate change helped sparked a worldwide movement.

But Thunberg, 16, took on her critics directly, saying all she and her young supporters were doing was highlighting the dramatic risks as shown by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

She accused politicians, business leaders and journalists of failing to communicate the scientific truth as shown in the latest IPCC report and leaving the burden to children.

"We become the bad guys who have to tell people these uncomfortable things because no one else wants to, or dares to," said Thunberg, speaking in English at one of the parliament's conference rooms.

"And just for quoting or acting on these numbers, these scientific facts, we receive unimaginable amounts of hate and threats. We are being mocked and lied about by members of parliament and journalists," she added.

The activist was invited by 162 MPs from a cross-party group concerned about climate change called "Let's Accelerate".

But many conservative figures on the French right have criticized the invitation, dismissing her as a "prophetess in shorts" and the "Justin Bieber of ecology" and refused to attend the speech.

Republicans MP Guillaume Larrive called on MPs to boycott her appearance, saying that to fight climate change "what we need is scientific progress and political courage, not apocalyptic gurus".

Julien Aubert, like Larrive a Republicans MP contending for leadership of the right-wing party, snapped: "Don't count on me to applaud a prophetess in shorts, a Nobel Prize for Fear."

Jordan Bardella, an MEP who is one of the rising stars of the far-right National Rally (RN), told France 2 television that "this dictatorship of perpetual emotion -- all the more when it relies on children -- is a new form of totalitarianism".

Bardella, 23, lashed out at "using children to show a fatalism to try and explain to all young people that the world is finished, that everything is going to catch fire and that nothing is possible." -AFP