Renowned physicist and self-described Democrat Freeman Dyson said President Obama is wrong about global warming.

“I’m 100 percent Democrat myself, and I like Obama,” Dyson told The Register in an interview published Sunday. “But he took the wrong side on this issue, and the Republicans took the right side.”

Dyson lamented scientists are ignoring “obvious” facts about global warming, and continue to conflate air pollution — which he says is not behind global warming — with carbon dioxide, which is not technically a pollutant.

“How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to obvious facts?” Dyson asked.

He has taught physics for nearly 40 years at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and his work in electrodynamics, climate studies and nuclear engineering has earned him notoriety in the scientific community.

He acknowledged fossil fuels emit “very unpleasant stuff” when burned, but said pollution from coal, oil and gas is not behind global warming. The greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, he alleges, is what’s behind global temperature rises.

“Pollution is quite separate to the climate problem,” Dyson told The Register. “One can be solved, and the other cannot. And the public doesn’t understand that.”

Dyson was featured in the forward of a report released Monday by the UK-based Global Warming Policy Foundation, where he challenged his colleagues to honestly judge the climatic effects of carbon dioxide. (RELATED: CO2 Emissions Are Making The Earth Greener)

“To any unprejudiced person reading this account, the facts should be obvious: that the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide as a sustainer of wildlife and crop plants are enormously beneficial, that the possibly harmful climatic effects of carbon dioxide have been greatly exaggerated, and that the benefits clearly outweigh the possible damage,” Dyson wrote.

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