Dutch professor leaves UN climate panel

Dutch professor Richard Tol took his leave from the UN climate panel, as he does not agree with the negative conclusions in the latest UN climate report. The consequences of climate change are over-estimated in his opinion. 

"The panel is being governed from within the environmental policy, not from the science", Tol said. Last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) presented their fifth climate change report in Yokohama, Japan.

The report is warning that any chance of reversing global warming will be lost if something is not done on a global scale to change climate policies.

Climate economy professor Tol finds the report "alarmist and apocalyptic" and that the effects of climate change are being exaggerated. "That over-estimation is being encouraged by a self-selection of authors and referents in the panel", Tol tells Belgian paper De Morgen. Tol refused to sign the report, according to the Daily Mail.

"There are leading scientists with the IPCC, but there are many average researchers who are just as good. Next to that we seat a number of other people who have the right political connections. The organization is being led and controlled by people who have a stake in climate policy. The IPCC is being governed from within the environmental policy, not from the science."

It is for this reason that Tol has chosen to step out of the panel. According to the professor, two official researches have shown that the IPCC is systematically over-estimating the consequences of climate change.

Tol is a professor of economics at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, as well as a professor of the economics of climate change at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.