The United Nations reports that human-caused climate change now threatens one million plant and animal species in the coming years if urgent global action is not taken, but a scientist who frequently butts heads with the UN says that conclusion is "absolute rubbish."

The report on biodiversity says a half-million land species "have insufficient habitat for long-term survival" and will likely go extinct in a matter of decades until human activity radically changes.  The report also says our actions are putting human survival in long-term jeopardy.

"It's more of the current hysteria.  Absolute rubbish.  There's not one bit of evidence to support anything they're saying," said Dr. Tim Ball, a former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg and author of "The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science." 

George Mason University Professor Thomas Lovejoy told the Associated Press "the biological diversity of this planet has really been hammered, and this is really our last chance to address all that."  UC Santa Barbara ecologist Lee Hannah is quoted as saying we are "in the middle of the sixth great extinction crisis."

Ball has a challenge for the experts.

"Get them to name the species that have gone extinct in the last ten years.  Get them to give you some names.  Don't just say that there's this number.  Give me the actual names.  You can't find it," said Ball.

According to Ball, most scientists believe only about 35 percent of the earth's species are even identified and the concrete data we do have shows species numbers moving in the opposite direction.

"Every single week we're finding far more species than they're claiming are going extinct," said Ball.  "Just a few years ago they were saying there were something like 20,000 species.  Now the estimates are 20 million."

Ball says numbers like this are hard to rebut in detail because they're not based on any detail.

"It's purely a number that they've come up with that, because it's put out by a scientist suddenly is treated like it's an actual measurement.  It isn't" said Ball.

Listen to the full podcast as Dr. Ball explains the logic used by climate scientists to conclude that species are vanishing or endangered at an alarming rate and what the real goal of these sorts of reports is.