One of the world’s top environmental organizations, the UN-affiliated International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), has publicly stated that global warming is being overhyped. The Geneva-based organization made the surprising comments with regard to the often-heard claim that global warming is the chief threat to the extinction of species.

In fact, climate change is "far from the number-one threat" to the survival of most species, said Jean Christophe Vie, deputy head of the IUCN species program. Vie considers hunting, overfishing, and human destruction of habitat as more important, and more urgent, threats that should not take a back seat to climate change. "There are so many other immediate threats that, by the time climate change really kicks in, many species will not exist anymore." The IUCN compiles the authoritative international Redlist of endangered species.

IUCN’s comments, reported Friday in Times Online, were made in defence of a paper in Science by two University of Oxford researchers that found climate change models yield invalid results because they don’t reflect the real world. "The evidence of climate change-driven extinctions have really been overplayed," concluded Professor Kathy Willis, the paper’s lead author who is also director of the Oxford Long-Term Ecology Laboratory.

IUCN, established in 1948 as the world’s first global environmental organization, is the world’s oldest and largest global environmental network. It is comprised of more than 1,000 government and NGO member organizations and almost 11,000 volunteer scientists in more than 160 countries. IUCN has official observer status at the United Nations General Assembly.