This comes from the Daily Mail:
- Richard Tol claims he is fighting a sustained attack on his reputation
- Professor from Sussex University is a highly respected climate economist
- Criticised by campaigners after saying report summary was ‘alarmist’
- In his opinion, it focused on ‘scare stories’
The professor who refused to sign last week’s high-profile UN climate report because it was too ‘alarmist’, has told The Mail on Sunday he has become the victim of a smear campaign.
Richard Tol claims he is fighting a sustained attack on his reputation by a key figure from a leading institution that researches the impact of global warming.
Prof Tol said: ‘This has all the characteristics of a smear campaign. It’s all about taking away my credibility as an expert.’
Prof Tol, from Sussex University, is a highly respected climate economist and one of two ‘co-ordinating lead authors’ of an important chapter in the 2,600-page report published last week by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
He has been widely criticised by green campaigners after he claimed that the much shorter ‘summary for policymakers’ – hammered out in all-night sessions between scientists and government officials over a week-long meeting in Yokohama, Japan – was overly ‘alarmist’.
In his view, the summary focused on ‘scare stories’ and suggestions the world faced ‘the four horsemen of the apocalypse’.
He said he did not want his name associated with it because he felt ‘uncomfortable’ with the way the summary exaggerated the economic impact of global warming.
The source of the alleged smear campaign is Bob Ward, director of policy at the London School of Economics’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change.
Mr Ward – neither an economist nor a climate expert – claimed on the institute’s website that he was waging ‘an ongoing struggle’ to force Prof Tol to correct ‘errors’ in his work.
Mr Ward had earlier sent an email disparaging Prof Tol’s research to several leading IPCC scientists and officials.
Via Climate Depot on more dissenters:
Another Scientist Dissents! Fmr. NASA scientist Dr. Les Woodcock ‘Laughs’ at Global Warming – Top Prof. Declares: ‘Global warming is nonsense’
Emeritus Professor Chemical Thermodynamics Dr. Leslie Woodcock of the University of Manchester’s School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science and a former NASA researcher, dissented on man-made global warming. Woodcock declared there was “professional misconduct by Government advisors around the world” when it comes to man-made climate change claims. Woodcock, who received his PhD from the University of London, (Full Bio here – [email protected]) is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a founding editor of Molecular Simulation, and a recipient of a Max Planck Society Visiting Fellowship, has more than 70 published journal papers, explained: “The theory of ‘man-made climate change’ is an unsubstantiated hypothesis’ – water is a much more powerful greenhouse gas and there is is 20 time more of it in our atmosphere (around one per cent of the atmosphere) whereas CO2 is only 0.04% – ‘Carbon dioxide has been made out to be some kind of toxic gas but the truth is it’s the gas of life. We breath it out, plants breath it in. The green lobby has created a do-good industry and it becomes a way of life, like a religion.”
Woodcock continued: “The temperature of the earth has been going up and down for millions of years, if there are extremes, it’s nothing to do with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it’s not permanent and it’s not caused by us. Global warming is nonsense.”
“If you talk to real scientists who have no political interest, they will tell you there is nothing in global warming. It’s an industry which creates vast amounts of money for some people.