A highland laird is preparing to take on Nobel prize winner Al Gore by distributing his own film countering the ex-US vice-president's apocalyptic production on climate change.

Viscount Monckton, a policy adviser in the 1980s to Margaret Thatcher, has prepared a DVD of a recent address to the Cambridge University union in which he attacks the science behind Gore's warnings.

He was scathing yesterday about both Gore and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Gore last week.

Viscount Monckton, who lives in Rannoch, Perthshire, has already supplied evidence in support of Stewart Dimmock, the Kent school governor who took the government to court over the distribution in schools of Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth.

Dimmock is backed by the New Party, headed by Lanarkshire quarry owner Robert Durward, who campaigns on a platform of low taxes and minimal regulation on industry.

Their legal action has resulted in a requirement for the Gore film to be balanced by other material giving an alternative point of view. So far this is to take the form of The Great Global Warming Swindle, a film produced by climate change deniers and broadcast by Channel 4.

Christopher Monckton's contribution, Apocalypse No!, is based on an address he gave to 400 undergraduates at the Cambridge Union. Its distribution is being funded by a right-wing Washington think-tank, the Science and Public Policy Institute.

Mr Monckton, 55, said yesterday he had expressed his concerns that the official views on climate change were going unchallenged and felt it right to circulate his presentation to every school in Britain so that, if head teachers saw fit, pupils could be allowed to see some of the scientific material the government was "rather anxious" that they should not see.

He said those preaching about climate change were acting from the same motives as those who got DDT banned, resulting, he said, in between 30 million and 50 million deaths from malaria.

"They are the same suspects - people who hate western values. Some of them are communists."

In 1999 he launched the world's most expensive jigsaw puzzle, which retailed at £29.99 and had no picture, but 209 pieces that had to be fitted into a 12-sided grid.

The selling attraction was that Monckton was offering £1m to anyone who could complete it before a closing date in 2003. Contrary to expectations, somebody won in under a year, too soon for the insurance policy he had taken out to cover the loss.

As a result he had to sell his then stately home, the 67-room Crimonmogate estate in Aberdeenshire.

He now suffers chronic ill-health but will speak at length about his crusade to put across the dissenting point of view on global warming. "The imagined danger of man-made climate change is much greater than anything that could happen in reality," he said.

"If you tell the underdeveloped countries of the world that they cannot enjoy the benefits of development that we do you make the problem worse"

He said the IPCC had only appointed people qualified by their willingness to peddle the alarmist view.

Friends of the Earth Scotland's Chief Executive, Duncan McLaren, said: "In the battle against climate change we need a flood of positive solutions, not a deluge of free DVDs offering contradictory information.

"Scientists who took part in the Great Global Warming Swindle have publicly said their contributions were distorted.

"Thankfully, I know that young people are smart enough to work out fact from fiction. That is why I am optimistic, despite the size of the challenge we all face, that climate change can be tackled."