Dominic Lawson: Alarmism based on dubious economics

Sir Nicholas Stern launched The Economics of Climate Change yesterday. Again. And why not? The Stern Review was so universally acclaimed at its original launch ­ indeed it was acclaimed even before anyone had read it ­ that it would be a truly self-denying author who refused to listen to his publisher's demand for a curtain-call.

The political classes throughout the Western world have knelt at Stern's feet. The Republican Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has quoted Sir Nicholas' words with almost religious fervour ­ as have many of the newly empowered Democrats. The Conservative Prime Minister of Canada last week dumped his environment minister, partly to counter the Liberal opposition's claims that he was failing to take Stern seriously.

The same effect is pulsing through Europe: a French television commentator on economics asked me at lunch in Paris last week what I thought of the Stern Report. When I evinced less than total enthusiasm, he almost choked on his saucisson. Yesterday's Stern-fest was hosted by my lunch companion's English equivalent, the BBC's Stephanie Flanders. So you can say goodbye to any criticism of Stern on Newsnight.

Indeed BBC Television ­ I exonerate BBC Radio and BBC Online ­ has become a claque for climate change catastrophists. This week's special offer will be Climate Change: Britain Under Threat, presented by David Attenborough. According to the BBC's pre-publicity, Saint David will say that Britain "will be tropical by 2100". That should be very good news for the BBC's resident naturalist. After all, the tropical climate is uniquely favourable as a natural habitat for wildlife of every sort. Think of the money and carbon saved by filming in the UK rather than in what we now call the tropics. That's the trouble with the climate change doom-mongers: they can never see the beneficial side effects of their own imaginary scenarios.

A very funny example was last week's report on climate change by the European Commission. It warned that southern Europe would become too hot for most tourists to bear: "The annual migration of northern Europeans to the countries of the Mediterranean in search of the traditional summer 'sun and sea' holiday is the single largest flow of tourists across the globe. This large group of tourists, totalling about 100 million per annum spends an estimated ¤100bn (£66bn) per year. Any climate-induced change in these flows of tourists and money would have very large implications for the destinations involved." Yes, it would; but hold on a minute ­ isn't that what they want? Aren't we being told by exactly the same people that we should stop our annual pilgrimage south, whether we get there by plane or gas-guzzling family car?

Nevertheless, why should we worry about the Spanish and Italian economies, when the future of the entire planet is at stake, as Sir Nicholas Stern argues it is ­ and who dares argue with Sir Nicholas? Until yesterday, anyone who did was treated like the man in the Bateman cartoon who performed some dreadful social solecism; but simultaneously with Nicholas Stern's RSA love-in, the journal World Economics unleashed a mighty barrage of academic anathemas against the Stern Review. World Economics is the most respected publication of its sort ­ indeed Sir Nicholas himself chose to preview his findings there, rather than in any other journal. There are no fewer than three papers in the current edition which comprehensively trash Stern, two from separate groups of climatologists, and one from a group of economists.

Let's keep in mind that Stern's basic assertion is that if we "continue with business as usual" there is a "50 per cent chance" of global temperatures rising by 5C by 2100, and furthermore that everyone has overestimated the proportionate global costs of moving rapidly to a low-carbon economy. Richard Tol, the professor of sustainability and global change at the Centre for Marine and Climate Research at Hamburg, and Gary Yohe, the lead author of four chapters in the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are savage in their rebuke to Stern.

Professors Tol and Yohe write that, since Stern claims only to have incorporated existing published climate projections, "it is surprising that he has produced numbers that are so far outside the range of previously published literature"; that he "double-counts risks" and that his "exaggerations are products of substandard analysis".

In looking at the three main bases of his cost-benefit analysis, they say that "his first assumption is simply wrong, the latter two are misleading." It's important to note that Tol and Yohe believe that man-made carbon emissions are a significant factor in global warming; but they conclude that Stern's "alarmism based on dubious economics" is no sort of basis for government policies.

The second paper is by a group of climatologists who are not convinced by the argument that industrial man is the author of climate change, and their attack makes Tol and Yohe's seem mild. Example after example of Stern's wilful forcing of the facts is given, of which there's space here to mention only one.

Stern's headline projection is that "250-550 million additional people may be at risk" of hunger. It is known, however, that additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has a "fertilisation effect", which would mitigate some of the consequences of aridity in soil. It turns out that Stern, contrary to all academic work in this field, assumes no fertilisation effect from the additional CO2.

While Sir Nicholas should be very concerned by these criticisms, they will be regarded as irrelevant by the shock troops of climate catastrophists such as Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace. They have long since left reason behind. These organisations remind me of the old-fashioned coppers who believed in something called "noble cause" corruption. This meant that if you "knew" that a certain "villain" was guilty of a particular crime, you should fabricate events if that was necessary to convince a court.

This approach was most honestly expressed by one of the earliest advocates of the threat from man-made carbon emissions, Dr Stephen Schneider. In an interview in 1989, Dr Schneider ­ a climatologist who 10 years earlier had been warning the world about the imminence of a new Ice Age ­ declared: "To capture the public imagination we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and little mention of any doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective and being honest." Sir Nicholas Stern has certainly been effective.

d.lawson@independent.co.uk