The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) this week issued its latest report detailing what it regards as the dangers of failing to heavily regulate fossil fuels and require the use of green technology. But the report has come under fire from critics who claim the IPCC has exaggerated the dangers of global warming and ignored the potential benefits.

In issuing the "Working Group II Contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report", U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged “all countries to act swiftly and boldly at every level” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

IPCC Chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri warned that “nobody on the planet will be untouched by climate change,” which he linked to shrinking glaciers, dwindling crop yields, and vector-borne diseases like West Nile Virus.

“The world has to take this report seriously because there are implications for [the] food supply,” Pachauri added.

But other scientists do not share the IPCC’s  view of global warming and its effects. The  Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based free-market research organization, brought together its own alternative group of more than 50 international climate experts: the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), headed by Dr. Fred Singer, a professor at George Mason University.

The group published its own review, more than 1,000 pages long, of the new IPCC report and highlighted what it says are factual problems with the U.N. agency’s conclusions.

Contrary to the IPCC’s findings, there is “little or no risk of increasing food insecurity due to global warming or rising atmospheric CO2 [carbon dioxide] levels,” the NIPCC said in a press release summarizing its study.

Rural farmers “are benefiting from rising agricultural productivity around the world, including in parts of Asia and Africa where the need for increased food supplies is most critical.” Rising  temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels “play a key role in the realization of such benefits,” the NIPCC report said.

Moreover, it is false to assert that CO2 is a pollutant, according to the NIPCC. It describes carbon dioxide as “a non-toxic, non-irritating, and natural component of the atmosphere,” adding that long-term studies demonstrate that increased amounts of CO2 are actually beneficial to plants.

Moreover, Singer and Company believe it  is wrong to suggest, as does the IPCC, that warming  is necessarily dangerous to human health. They concluded that “a modest warming of the planet will result in a net reduction of human mortality from temperature-related events. More lives are saved by global warming via the amelioration of cold-related deaths than are lost due to excessive heat. Global warming will have a negligible influence on human morbidity and the spread of infectious diseases.”

If fossil fuels were eliminated, much of the world’s population “will die,” Singer said in an interview Tuesday with KABC Radio in Los Angeles. Singer – author of a book entitled "The Unstoppable Global Warming – Every 1,500 years" – told talk-show host Larry Elder that “the real danger to the planet is cooling.”

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