Paul Reiter

Paul Reiter is a professor of medical entomology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France. He is a member of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Committee on Vector Biology and Control. He was an employee of the Center for Disease Control (Dengue Branch) for 22 years. He is a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society. ^[1] He is a specialist in mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever.^[2]

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Criticism of the IPCC

Reiter says he was a contributor to the third IPCC Working Group II (Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability) report, but resigned because he "found [himself] at loggerheads with persons who insisted on making authoritative pronouncements, although they had little or no knowledge of [his] speciality". After resigning he says he struggled to get his name removed from the Third report^[3]

"After much effort and many fruitless discussions, I decided to concentrate on the USGCCRP and resigned from the IPCC project. My resignation was accepted, but in a first draft I found that my name was still listed. I requested its removal, but was told it would remain because "I had contributed". It was only after strong insistence that I succeeded in having it removed."

Reiter is sceptical about the IPCC process, as seen in his April 25, 2006 testimony to the United States Senate:

"A galling aspect of the debate is that this spurious 'science' is endorsed in the public forum by influential panels of 'experts.' I refer particularly to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Every five years, this UN-based organization publishes a 'consensus of the world's top scientists' on all aspects of climate change. Quite apart from the dubious process by which these scientists are selected, such consensus is the stuff of politics, not of science. Science proceeds by observation, hypothesis and experiment. The complexity of this process, and the uncertainties involved, are a major obstacle to a meaningful understanding of scientific issues by non-scientists. In reality, a genuine concern for mankind and the environment demands the inquiry, accuracy and scepticism that are intrinsic to authentic science. A public that is unaware of this is vulnerable to abuse." ^[4]

Paul Reiter presented Malaria in the debate on climate change and mosquito-borne disease^[4] on April 25, 2006. The four primary points of his presentation here were:

1. Malaria is not an exclusively tropical disease
2. The transmission dynamics of the disease are complex; the interplay of climate, ecology, mosquito biology, mosquito behavior and many other factors defies simplistic analysis.
3. It is facile to attribute current resurgence of the disease to climate change, or to use models based on temperature to “predict” future prevalence.
4. Environmental activists use the ‘big talk’ of science to create a simple but false paradigm. Malaria specialists who protest this are generally ignored, or labelled as ‘sceptics’.

The UK government has said that Reiter "does not accurately represent the current scientific debate on the potential impacts of climate change on health in general, or malaria in particular. He appears to have been quite selective in the references and reports that he has criticised, focusing on those that are neither very recent nor reflective of the current state of knowledge, now or when they were published" [1].

Quotes

"This claim that the IPCC is the world's top 1500 or 2500 scientists, you look at the bibliographies of the people and its simply not true. There are quite a number of non-scientists." - from The Great Global Warming Swindle

Affiliations

• Insects and Infectious Diseases, Pasteur Institute, Paris, France

References

• Articles indexed by Google Scholar
• A Mosquito Bites Back, New York Times, August 24 1997
• Warming 'not spreading malaria', BBC News, 21 September 2000
• CDC Mosquito Expert to Research at HSPH for Year Harvard School of Public Health, June 7 2001