A member of the UK parliament, MP Peter Lilley, has written a scathing rebuttal study to the 2006 “Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change” which has been used a a basis for UK government to move forward with climate policy. The number of errors and distortions he has uncovered is quite extraordinary and brings the validity of the Stern report into serious question, if not outright falsifying it. – Anthony
From the Global Warming Policy Foundation:
As the cost of government measures to combat climate change hit households and businesses, a new study published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation casts grave doubts on the validity of the “Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change” which the government relies on to justify its policies.
The substantial study, by Peter Lilley MP, is the most thorough analysis of the Stern Review so far undertaken. It takes the IPCC’s view of the science of global warming as given, but points out that Stern’s economic conclusions contradict the views of most of the world’s leading environmental economists and even the economic conclusions of the IPCC
itself. The study also catalogues a series of errors and distortions in the Stern Review “any one of which would have caused it to fail peer review”.
Because Stern’s conclusions endorsed policies adopted by both government and opposition and its highly tendentious assumptions were not explicit, it was initially accepted without public scrutiny.
The new study shows the Stern Review to depend critically on “selective choice of facts, unusual economic assumptions and a propagandist narrative – which would never have passed peer review”.
Describing it as “policy based evidence”, Peter Lilley argues the government can no longer rely on it to justify expenditure of many billions of pounds and calls for a return return instead to “evidence based policies”.
Stern’s central conclusion that “If we don’t act, the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least 5% of global GDP each year now and forever” whereas “the costs of action – reducing greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the worst impacts of climate change – can be limited to around 1% of GDP each year” is found to be entirely fallacious.
Lilley’s study demonstrates that the benefits of curbing emissions now and henceforth will not be five times the cost of action, as Stern claims. “It is achieved by verbal virtuosity combined with statistical sophistry. In fact, even on Stern’s figures, the cumulative costs of reducing greenhouse gases will exceed the benefits until beyond 2100”, Lilley points out.
“If we continue to follow Stern’s advice, the principal losers, apart from British taxpayers and businesses, would be developing countries who cannot raise living standards without massively increasing their use of fossil fuels and will therefore be responsible for most of the growth of carbon emissions,” Lilley argues.
Lilley asks: “why should this comparatively poor generation make the sacrifices Stern demands to improve living standards of people in 2200 who, if we take no action to prevent global warming – even on the worst scenario depicted by Stern – will be 7 times better off than us?
Lilley calls on the government to cease basing its climate change policy on the flawed Stern Review and commission a new independent cost benefit study of alternative strategies.
* Full report: What Is Wrong With Stern? (pdf) Lilley-Stern_Rebuttal 2
* Executive Summary (pdf) Lilley-Stern_Executive_Summary
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“… the cumulative costs of reducing greenhouse gases will exceed the benefits until beyond 2100”
That’s assuming that there ARE any benefits, and if CO2 is not the Great Boogeyman controlling our climate that it has been made out to be, there will be trivial (if any) benefits of sacrificing our economies on the barren altar of carbon strangulation.
Looks promising. The cracks are beginning to outrun the ability to paper over them.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/costly-decarbonisation-of-the-economy-is-based-on-a-flawed-review/story-e6frgd0x-1226464248859
No new studies will ever change the policies of any European country when it comes to this subject. They are too far invested in these policies both in money & in the way they embrace it. To do so, would show how wrong they really are. Have you ever met any European admitt they were wrong about anything? I sure have not in my 54 years.
If the past is any predictor of the future, Peter Lilley’s falsification of the Stern Review, like all the falsifications that have preceded it — of AGW science and otherwise — will have no effect. The drum-roll of AGW will go on without missing a beat.
Oh joy! We have at least one sane MP. Thanks Mr. Lilley
I was on business in England when this monumental monstrosity of bogosity came out.
It got worse. The news reporter on the once reputable but now national stolen fee-funded Lysenkoist channel introduced it with something like the following:
“With this economic report, how can anyone dispute the effects of man-made global warming on the planet?”. Seriously.
I was so gobsmacked, I was happy to be standing by the hotel room bed as I fell backwards in ironic laughter/disgust/anger.
NB:
bogosity definition
/boh-go’s*-tee/ The degree to which something is “bogus” in the hackish sense of “bad”. Bogosity is measured with a bogometer; in a seminar, when a speaker says something bogus, a listener might raise his hand and say “My bogometer just triggered”. More extremely, “You just pinned my bogometer” means you just said or did something so outrageously bogus that it is off the scale, pinning the bogometer needle at the highest possible reading (one might also say “You just redlined my bogometer”).
The economic pillar was always far flimsier since it relied on Stern — a government economist, commissioned by the government, who produced the answer the government needed. Moreover, Stern’s key conclusion — that the benefits of reducing emissions would be five to 20 times the cost — flatly contradicts the IPCC, which concluded: “costs and benefits are broadly comparable in magnitude” so it could not establish “an emissions pathway or stabilisation level where benefits exceed costs”. Most environmental economists whose work Stern supposedly reviewed reached conclusions closer to the IPCC.
Nonetheless, Labour ministers and their Conservative/Lib Dem successors cling with increasing desperation to Stern: albeit like the proverbial drunk — more for support than illumination.
In short, Stern selected and manipulated evidence to back a policy — creating policy-based evidence when what we need is evidence-based policy.
Government economists privately recognise that Stern’s economics are no longer defensible. They fall back on Harvard economist Martin Weitzman’s suggestion that “Stern may be right for the wrong reasons”. Weitzman says: if there is a finite possibility, however small, of an infinitely bad outcome (human extinction) then virtually any cost is justified to prevent it. Paradoxically, using this thesis to rescue Stern’s conclusions means abandoning their scientific pillar — the IPCC’s claim (shared by Stern) that “the science is certain” and climate sensitivity can be derived from known “laws of physics and chemistry”. Instead, Weitzman assumes that neither scientific laws nor empirical studies can set any upper limit on the size of the greenhouse effect.
However, if climate sensitivity is as high as Weitzman’s theory requires to put mankind’s survival at risk, its impact must have been largely concealed by natural variations even before the pause in warming this century. So it should soon become obvious as those fluctuations revert to the mean, giving plenty of time to respond.
There may be a case for a modest, gradual approach to climate change rather than Stern’s crash program. But ministers can no longer rely on the discredited Stern review to defend an unaffordable policy.
Peter Lilley is a British Conservative Party MPFollow the money.
O.T. JoNova site is currently returning a 403 forbidden error?
This is a welcome study by Peter Lilley – even if he is only restating the conclusions Nigel Lawson drew 4 years ago in his excellent book ‘An Appeal To Reason. A Cool Look At Global Warming’
Upon reading the executive summary I was very disappointed to see several glaring spelling mistakes: suffcicient/sufficient twice(!) on page 3 and Sclae/Scale on page 4. Couldn’t he run the thing through a spell-checker? Warmists will be looking for any reason to dismiss this report; we could do without providing them the ammunition with sloppy spelling.
Peter Lilley is up against some interesting political forces notably the Energy and Climate Change Committee. In a recent report, ‘The road to UNFCCC COP18 and beyond’ their policy was proposed to the Department of Energy and Climate Change :
“The Department of Energy and Climate Change should support the use of the Human Development Index in future to determine equitably which countries are treated as ‘developed’ – and required to decrease their emissions immediately and which countries are given excess carbon permits until their average earnings come in line with other developed countries.”
http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/energy-and-climate-change-committee/news/unf-ccc-publication/
The Energy and Climate Change Committee is currently chaired by a colourful MP named Tim Yeo:
“In the past year, he raked in £140,000 from directorships with six ‘green’ companies which are developing expensive renewable energies. One senior Tory figure said: ‘Every time Tim moralises about why we must go more green, I hear tills ringing in the background.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2189492/It-wonder-Tim-Yeos-branded-Jolly-Green-Hypocrite.html
And then there’s John Gummer now known as Lord Deben:
“Lord Deben was named by Mr Cameron last month as his preferred candidate to be the new chairman of the Energy and Climate Change Committee. The committee recommends targets for reducing carbon-dioxide emissions and subsidies for the ‘renewable’ energy industry.
“He is at the centre of a new conflict-of-interest row after it was revealed he is chairman of Forewind, a consortium trying to build thousands of turbines in the North Sea’s Dogger Bank.
“Lord Deben already chairs Sancroft, a lobbying and consultancy firm based in Queen Anne’s Gate, Westminster. One of its specialities is advising businesses on how to make money from policies enacted to combat global warming.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2190351/Second-Tory-key-climate-change-role-bid-build-giant-North-Sea-windfarm.html
I want to know when we can commence the Crimes Against Humanity trials. Mann, Jones, Gore and all their co-conspirators have a lot to answer for!
Here in the European country of Oregon our public officials have been drinking the green/sustainable/save-us-from-ourselves cool-aid for so long they feel compelled to use whatever means necessary to impose their will upon the unwilling public. It’s getting ugly.
Through behind the scenes conniving our state and local governments are in full shadow government mode to force upon our communities what they do not want. When the public opposes them and rejects the agenda pitched as vital the government planner class removes the public from participating.
They will never admit anything or be capable of adapting to anything less than all of their objectives.
The only thing they understand is cold blooded defeat. Through citizen’s initiatives and candidate elections to get majorities on councils, commissions and the legislature along with the governorship and other statewide offices.
That’s why I tell people it is not enough to have superior information if you don’t use it to harm, to damage to destroy the political arena that is assailing our way of life.
Nothing is more of an affront to the whole spectrum of every day life than the heavy hand of government gone AGW wild.
Low cost and plentiful energy, fuel and all they provide are at risk from policy attacks with no upside.
I wonder how deep the ice in the coming Ice Age will have to get before these brainwashed European pols will admit maybe–just maybe–they were flat out wrong about the Stern Review.
Of course, I’m wasting my breath (or keyboard strokes) trying to make sense of their negligence, stupidity, and/or complicity in the world’s biggest false premise ever!
According to Tory Aardvark, the EU have refused to increase carbon emissions to 30% as it is unworkable, too expensive and driving industries from Europe and the chancellor of UK has started to mumble that green policy is unworkable. So sunshine is getting through.
clipe says:
September 3, 2012 at 4:18 pm
Government economists privately recognise that Stern’s economics are no longer defensible. They fall back on Harvard economist Martin Weitzman’s suggestion that “Stern may be right for the wrong reasons”. Weitzman says: if there is a finite possibility, however small, of an infinitely bad outcome (human extinction) then virtually any cost is justified to prevent it.
But Weitzman’s argument involves an invalid assumption: that the “cost” will actually make the probability of the “infinitely bad outcome” less.
Bottom line: AGW is bad and the people who exacerbate it should pay for it by having taxes increased on any usage of non-renewable energy!
I have said many times before, that if AGW is universally believed, then governments can tax businesses and individuals, who feel that the aforesaid taxes are justified, as some sort of penance!
The governments of North America, Europe and to a lesser extent, Australasia need to increase taxes to pay the interest on their national debts. Their citizens do not object to paying these taxes, because they have been lied to, by so called scientists and governments; it is, after all a penance!
China and India do not have these constraints, so their economies are booming, meanwhile my country (the UK) keeps on finding new ways to be subservient to Brussels and to increase taxes, despite the fact that increased taxes depress the economy. I do not feel the need to be penitent, because I do not believe in AGW, yet I have to pay these taxes!
“Increasing taxes to stimulate the economy is like asking a man to stand in a bucket and
raise himself of the ground by lifting the handle” Winston Churchill.
“Governments have the luxury to spend money that they have not earned, or are morally entitled to. Citizens cannot do either of these things, because they will break the law that was created by the same governments: A political, legal and immoral paradox” Andrew Harding.
Stern’s extreme “green” bias and skewing of facts and economics is astonishing.
etc.
To assume that a warming planet imposes costs and provides no benefits is to ignore reality.
There will be costs if the planet warms by a degree but there will also be benefits. It is dishonest to account for the former and ignore the latter. If a warmer climate makes one crop difficult to grow this means you may need to choose a different crop. To count the lost value of the old crop as an ongoing cost for all eternity and ignore the value of the new one is simply dishonest accounting.
There are also likely to be distinct advantage to warming that are often ignored. We will see a longer growing season in many localities, reduced danger of tipping into an ice age, reduced heating costs, reduced deaths in winter due to cold, and so forth. There are also advantages in terms of incfreased agricultural productivity directly from higher CO2 levels. It isn’t clear that the costs of warming even outweigh the benefits before a cent is spent on mitigation. Would it really hurt Great Britain to have a climate more like that of Spain? Of course these costs and benefits are likely to be unevenly spread. Spain probably doesn’t need to be warmer. However I must note that most of the projected warming is supposed to occur in places that are currently cold where warming is likely to be more beneficial than not. It is entirely possible that we may in fact be better off overall in a warmer world. It is hard to tell because an honest accounting of both the costs and benefits is seldom performed.
GlynnMhor says:
September 3, 2012 at 3:29 pm
“… the cumulative costs of reducing greenhouse gases will exceed the benefits until beyond 2100″
That’s assuming that there ARE any benefits, and if CO2 is not the Great Boogeyman controlling our climate that it has been made out to be, there will be trivial (if any) benefits of sacrificing our economies on the barren altar of carbon strangulation.
Glynn,
Succinctly stated. The extreme AGW followers hide the science (Top of the atmosphere radiation measurements from satellite as compared to changes in ocean surface temperature changes. See the attached paper by Lindzen and Choi which is their third published paper to address this scientific question.) which clearly show the earth’s response to a forcing change is to resist the change (negative feedback) by increasing planetary cloud cover in the tropics. As Lindzen note if the planet’s response to a change in forcing is negative (planet resists) the forcing change then a doubling of CO2 will result in less than 1C with most of the warming occurring a high latitudes which will expand the biosphere.
Lindzen and Choi’s analysis is supported by observations which show the planet is not warm as predicted the IPCC.
http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/236-Lindzen-Choi-2011.pdf
On the Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity and Its Implications
We estimate climate sensitivity from observations, using the deseasonalized fluctuations in sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and the concurrent fluctuations in the top-of-atmosphere (TOA) outgoing radiation from the ERBE (1985-1999) and CERES (2000-2008) satellite instruments. … We argue that feedbacks are largely concentrated in the tropics, and the tropical feedbacks can be adjusted to account for their impact on the globe as a whole. Indeed, we show that including all CERES data (not just from the tropics) leads to results similar to what are obtained for the tropics alone – though with more noise. We again find that the outgoing radiation resulting from SST fluctuations exceeds the zerofeedback response thus implying negative feedback. In contrast to this, the calculated TOA outgoing radiation fluxes from 11 atmospheric models forced by the observed SST are less than the zerofeedback response, consistent with the positive feedbacks that characterize these models. The results imply that the models are exaggerating climate sensitivity.
However, warming from a doubling of CO2 would only be about 1oC (based on simple calculations where the radiation altitude and the Planck temperature depend on wavelength in accordance with the attenuation coefficients of wellmixed CO2 molecules; a doubling of any concentration in ppmv produces the same warming because of the logarithmic dependence of CO2’s absorption on the amount of CO2) (IPCC, 2007). This modest warming is much less than current climate models suggest for a doubling of CO2. Models predict warming of from 1.5oC to 5oC and even more for a doubling of CO2. Model predictions depend on the ‘feedback’ within models from the more important greenhouse substances, water vapor and clouds.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2012/04/11/a-new-global-warming-alarmist-tactic-real-temperature-measurements-dont-matter/
A New Global Warming Alarmist Tactic: Real Temperature Measurements Don’t Matter
What do you do if you are a global warming alarmist and real-world temperatures do not warm as much as your climate model predicted? Here’s one answer: you claim that your model’s propensity to predict more warming than has actually occurred shouldn’t prejudice your faith in the same model’s future predictions. Thus, anyone who points out the truth that your climate model has failed its real-world test remains a “science denier.”
This, clearly, is the difference between “climate science” and “science deniers.” Those who adhere to “climate science” wisely realize that defining a set of real-world parameters or observations by which we can test and potentially falsify a global warming theory is irrelevant and so nineteenth century. Modern climate science has gloriously progressed far beyond such irrelevant annoyances as the Scientific Method.
a different Stern, pretty funny:
4 Sept: SBS TV Australia: The Conversation: David Stern, ANU: Where is it cheapest to cut carbon emissions?
(from bottom of the article) David Stern receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
But when more than one country shares a common carbon price or tax, the total cost of the climate policy is higher in the countries whose economies are more carbon intensive; for example, Australia…
This is the main finding of an article by my Australian National University colleagues Jack Pezzey and Ross Lambie and myself in the current edition of the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics…
Our theory is that there are more “low-hanging fruit” – low cost or easy options for cutting emissions – in countries like the US and Australia which have had less-aggressive energy efficiency policies…
(PHOTO OF BANANA TREE WITH CAPTION: More low-hanging fruit can reduce the marginal cost of cutting emissions. Jane Rawson)
But when we think about the total costs of cutting carbon emissions, these less-efficient countries will bear higher costs. To use the same analogy, this is because the more fruit there is below a given height, the bigger the total crop will be. A common carbon price is like an agreement that all countries harvest emissions reductions up to the same height on the trees…
To test our theory, we need information on the costs of climate policies in different countries. Obviously we don’t actually know how much policies that don’t yet exist will cost. But we can use computer simulation models to try to estimate these costs and test our theory.
We used the results of a recent simulation exercise called EMF-22. Ten modelling teams from around the world took part. The models – called integrated assessment models – can simulate the effects of policies on the world economy and the climate. Each team used their model to simulate the effects of ten different future climate policy scenarios.
The results of the EMF-22 exercise broadly confirm our hypotheses. They show that the marginal abatement cost is highest in the European Union, lowest in China and India with the US in the middle. But when all countries adopt a common global carbon price, the total costs as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) are lowest in the European Union and highest in the two developing countries…
Our findings also emphasise the complexity of communicating climate change policies. There is no single answer to the question of “Where is it cheapest to cut carbon emissions?” and the choice of answer makes a difference.
http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/1688871/Where-is-it-cheapest-to-cut-carbon-emissions
‘Weitzman says: if there is a finite possibility, however small, of an infinitely bad outcome (human extinction) then virtually any cost is justified to prevent it.’
Well, there are a number of low probability things that could wipe out the human race eg an asteroid strike (and the science behind that is robust). Using Weitzman’s logic, do we spend all of our money countering all of them and, if so, how do we divide the money up between worthy causes. He is stating an extreme and idiotic version of the precautionary principle.
Regarding politicians and their support for AGW, I am optimistic. They only want re-election and will be fully aware of the public reaction to AGW as it starts to hit their pockets.