IT was perhaps the most recognisable voice on the planet, but this time it had a tone we had never heard before: Rage.

In his final piece to camera at the end of 2015 series The Great Barrier Reef, Sir David said coral reefs would be gone in decades due to climate change.

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Sir David Attenborough once raged on camera Credit: PR Handout

Sir David has returned to the Great Barrier Reef after first diving there for a 1957 Zoo Quest episode Credit: BBC

Then it came.

Red-faced, he demanded: “Do we really care so little about the Earth on which we live, that we don’t wish to protect one of its greatest ­wonders from the consequences of our behaviour?”

He paused and glared straight at the viewer. They then saw the broadcaster get up from his spot on a beach and walk away unsteadily as the sun set behind him.

Seeing his age so clearly was a shock. Time was running out — for David and for the world he loved so much.

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It was by far the clearest environmental message he had ever sent.

And, of course, nobody could make the point about climate change ­better than David.

He could personally document the terrible changes that had happened to life on Earth since the 1950s.

That was why he returned to the Great Barrier Reef after first diving there for a 1957 Zoo Quest episode.

Ahead of his 2015 series, he said: “People say to me, ‘What was the most magical thing you ever saw in your life?’, and I always say without a word of exaggeration, ‘The first time I was lucky enough to scuba dive on the Great Barrier Reef.’”

With his beloved coral bleached and its marine life dying, Sir David found himself at a turning point.

After a career dedicated to ­showing rather than telling, he began to speak out as an activist.

Later, in June 2015, he went to the White House to talk with President Barack Obama — a fan of the ­broadcaster since childhood — about global warming.

Then in 2018, David addressed the United Nations Climate Change Conference, warning that civilisation’s collapse was on the horizon.

In 2021 he spoke to the UN ­Security Council and then to the organisation’s conference in Glasgow.

The message was the same, and increasingly desperate.

But perhaps it was his document-aries that made his points best.

After the Great Barrier Reef series, they were increasingly focused in their message: Humans were destroying the world.

An unforgettable sequence in 2017’s ocean epic Blue Planet II showed albatross parents feeding plastic to their chicks.

Eighty-eight per cent of the hundreds of millions of people who watched it said they had changed their behaviour as a result.

It was dubbed “the Blue Planet effect”, and even the Queen ­banished the use of plastic bottles and straws on her estates.

Attenborough has documented the terrible changes that has happened to life on Earth since the 1950s Credit: BBC

The veteran documentary being honoured in 2022 Credit: Reuters

But of course, the message had been there from the start, even if the anger was not yet heard in Sir David’s famous breathy voice.

Perhaps most memorably, there was 1998’s The Life Of Birds, in which a lyrebird in Australia mimicked the sound of chainsaws that were cutting down its habitat.

But it was not until 2006 that he finally spoke out about the greatest threat of all: Climate change.

In March that year, the first ­episode of smash hit Planet Earth showed a starving polar bear curling up to die, robbed of the ice floes it relied on to hunt seals.

By this stage Sir David had repeatedly been voted Britain’s most trusted public figure, and he had been criticised for not using this power to draw attention to rising temperatures sooner.

He admitted at the time: “I was cautious about crying wolf. But I’m no longer sceptical. Now I do not have any doubt at all. I think ­climate change is the major challenge facing the world.”

Still, he always knew that showing people the wonders of nature was his greatest chance of saving it.

Despite being in his mid-70s when the new millennium began, his ­programmes in his later years have only got more spectacular, starting with 2001’s original Blue Planet.

Attenborough meets Barack Obama Credit: THE WHITE HOUSE

After the Great Barrier Reef series, they were increasingly focused in their message: Humans were destroying the world, pictured holding litter in 2017 Credit: BBC

Other series included The Life Of Mammals, Life In The Undergrowth about insects and invertebrates, Life In Cold Blood about reptiles and amphibians and Life Story — all of which he wrote as well as presented.

Major series he has narrated and ­presented, although he did not write them, include Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and Dynasties.

Again, they all created sensations as few other moments of television can.

Some viewers have still not recovered from the sight of racer snakes ganging up to chase an iguana in 2016’s Planet Earth II.

The technology was, as always, pioneering — including using a camera invented as a lab tool for ballistics to race alongside a cheetah running for a kill.

Then there was the world-first use of a camera that shot at such high speed it showed chameleons wrapping their tongues around prey, rather than “glueing” them with a sticky tongue, as had been thought for hundreds of years.

But it is not just technology. David himself has a gift for presenting that may never be matched.

Abseiling down a 13-metre wall at Cambridge University in 2016 Credit: Geoff Robinson Photography