And he’s hardly a “denier.”
Via Daily Mail:
A climate scientist has accused the United Nations of being too alarmist over global warming – and demanded his name be removed from a crucial new report.
Professor Richard Tol, an economist at the University of Sussex, said fellow UN academics were exaggerating climate change and comparing it to the ‘apocalypse’.
His comments are a blow to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which on Monday will publish its first update in seven years on the impacts of climate change.
Previous IPCC reports on climate impact have been plagued by errors that damaged the body’s credibility.
Most famously, it said in 2007 that glaciers in the Himalayas could disappear by 2035, a claim it has since withdrawn.
Scientists are meeting in Japan this week to agree the wording of the final document, which will be used to inform policy decisions of governments around the world.
Leaked drafts of the report predict that by the end of the century man-made global warming will have done serious harm to the global economy, displaced hundreds of millions of people and created violent conflict. Chapters on flooding, water supply and agriculture estimate huge impacts.
Prof Tol, the lead co-ordinating author of the report’s chapter on economics, was involved in drafting the summary for policymakers – the key document that goes to governments and scientists. But he has now asked for his name to be removed from the document.
He said: ‘The message in the first draft was that through adaptation and clever development these were manageable risks, but it did require we get our act together.
‘This has completely disappeared from the draft now, which is all about the impacts of climate change and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. This is a missed opportunity.’