FT opinion: Climate change demands action but not just on emissions

A lead convening author for the economic section of the new IPCC report disagrees with the outcome summary and wants his name scrapped from the document. Richard Tol, Professor at the University of Sussex and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam specialising in the economics of climate change, writing today in the FT, argues that "climate change demands action but not just on emissions". He argues that humans will manage a changing climate with the appropriate preparation, whereas fighting emissions is probably ineffective and inefficient. The IPCC, according to Toll, missed an opportunity to convey this message. Toll's views are however not widely shared. A member of the Dutch delegation to the climate conference, Prof Arthur Peterson, als at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, disagrees with Tol's criticism, saying that the IPCC indeed focusses more on negative risks than potential upsides (also here, in Dutch).