Scientists and officials are hotly debating the accuracy of an upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change summary on climate change, some saying the document's outlook is overly dire.
A draft of the report that leaked last week predicted an alarming future where falling crop yields, coastal floods and hotter temperatures lead to malnutrition and global unrest.
But researcher Richard Tol, an economist at the University of Sussex, believes the draft report exaggerates the effects of climate change. Tol, who has been heading the report's chapter on economics, has asked to have his name removed from the summary.
"The message in the first draft was that through adaptation and clever development these were manageable risks, but it did require we get our act together," he told BBC News.
"This has completely disappeared from the draft now, which is all about the impacts of climate change and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. This is a missed opportunity."
On the other hand, some say the final report will be "more nuanced," showing more ways that people can adapt than the last document did in 2007.
"We are going to frame the issue of climate change as more of a distributional issue," said Dr. Arthur Petersen, the chief scientist at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, as quoted by BBC News. "It's not doom and gloom but an additional stress on countries that are already severely stressed."
The final report will be unveiled along with a 29-page summary on March 31 when scientists and officials meet in Yokohama, Japan, the AFP reported. On April 13, the IPCC will introduce a third volume in Berlin that will detail strategies to scale back on carbon emissions.
The recently leaked IPCC draft report predicts that hundreds of millions will be hit by coastal flooding and displaced due to land loss. The land areas that are predicted to be hit the hardest are East Asia, Southeast Asia and South Asia.
Besides reducing global food sources, climate change will negatively affect people's health as hotter temperatures result in more heat waves and fires.
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