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Prof Richard Tol Photo: The Academy of Europe |
Richard Tol, the Dutch environmental economist,
who left Dublin's ESRI (Economic and Social Research Institute) in 2012 after a
dispute about research techniques, has become a dissenting author of the UN's
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
latest
report published Monday, that says the effects of climate change are already
occurring on all continents and across the oceans.
The summary report, titled 'Climate
Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, from Working Group II of
the IPCC', details the impacts of climate change to date, the future
risks from a changing climate, and the opportunities for effective action to
reduce risks. A total of 309 coordinating lead authors, lead authors, and review
editors, drawn from 70 countries, were selected to produce the report. They
enlisted the help of 436 contributing authors, and a total of 1,729 expert and
government reviewers.
The report concludes that responding to climate change involves making choices
about risks in a changing world. The nature of the risks of climate change is
increasingly clear, though climate change will also continue to produce
surprises. The report identifies vulnerable people,
industries, and ecosystems around the world. It finds that risk from a changing
climate comes from vulnerability (lack of preparedness) and exposure (people or
assets in harm’s way) overlapping with hazards (triggering climate events or
trends). Each of these three components can be a target for smart
actions to decrease risk.
Richard Tol, now a professor at the University of
Sussex and a professor of the Economics of Climate Change, Institute for
Environmental Studies and Department of Spatial Economics, Vrije Universiteit,
Amsterdam, has
told Reuters that he disagreed with some findings of the summary issued in
Japan today.
"The drafts became too alarmist," he said but he acknowledged some other authors
"strongly disagree with me."
The Financial Times reports today that
Chris Field, professor of environmental studies at
Stanford University in California, co-chair of the IPCC working group
that produced the report, said Prof Tol was outside the mainstream scientific
community. He suggested that the economist was upset because his research had
not been better represented in the summary.
“When the IPCC does a report, what you get is the
community’s position. Richard Tol is a wonderful
scientist but he’s not at the centre of the thinking. He’s kind of out on the
fringe,” Prof Field said before the report’s release.
“We have other authors who are out on the fringe
on the other side and I can assure you that every one of the 309 authors on my
report thinks that his or her research is under-cited and is not adequately
represented in the findings of the overall report.”
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