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
Anthony.
A trip on I-80 West to the Bay Area convinced me that many northern Californians enjoyed your recent enclave by evidence of the, impossible to remove fine dust, in every crevice of their vehicles. I’m a five year alumnus, and loved it. Did you the organizers have CO2 credits to burn that effigy?
To the subject at hand, I can envision multiple economists from multiple universities having contrary opinions based upon their different consulting contracts even within their own university system, based upon their different consulting contracts. As long as there is controversy and free lunch money out there, this should be the expected result.
Even the new MP Lilley analysis accepts the IPCC conclusions before ripping into the Stern economic analysis. We lost before we began.
I think that those who believe that it will take actual measurements, against the current modeling based consensus, to show the modeled information is wrong, are correct. Unfortunately that will take a multi-year-quiet-sun, as expressed in yesterday’s WUWT post and resulting negative impacts to show that…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/03/the-sun-still-slumping/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/14/all-three-of-these-lines-of-research-to-point-to-the-familiar-sunspot-cycle-shutting-down-for-a-while/
Everyone should review these posts and referred posts. How sad. Maybe we would all be best advised to ready our families for the next twenty years.
Bobby Davis says:
September 3, 2012 at 3:44 pm
Heh. Not all of us are social democrats.
DirkH: “Heh. Not all of us are social democrats.”
So you weren’t wrong, but those other guys were.
[snip – you aren’t Al Gore, your comment is not allowed until you change your handle]
David L. Hagen has already posted one of my favourite quips from Richard Tol’s forward to the Lilley paper above. Other favourites:
Sir Nicholas, now Lord Stern, was portrayed as an expert even though he had never published before on the economics of energy, environment or climate.
Nick Stern is, of course, free to use whatever discount rate he wants in his private life. Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta of Cambridge University has found that Stern should save 97.5% of his income, were Stern to follow the advice in the Stern Review.
clipe says:
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.
AKA “post normal science”. The political maneuvre that replaces actual science with the telling of scary stories. If your first story is called into question, you simply tell a scarier story. The fact that the first scary story is questionable proves “facts are uncertain”, and the scarier story ramps up “stakes are high and decisions are urgent!”.
In PNS, better called the Politics of Ignorance, lack of knowledge may be used to drive any decision.
cui bono says:
“Oh joy! We have at least one sane MP. Thanks Mr. Lilley”
You have another one in Graham Stringer MP
Its very difficult to operate in an almost ‘skeptic free zone’ like the House of Commons.
Free loaders like Tim Yeo MP will go out of their way to isolate skeptics and eliminate rational discussion on climate.
jayhd says:
September 3, 2012 at 5:21 pm
absolutely – they all need to answer for their ‘crimes – I wonder how many of the bandwagon freeloaders who milked the AGW gravy train can be charged too?
As for Stern, hopefully he can get all the discredit he deserves, and then some……
Water off a duck’s back! Almost every aspect of AGW has been derived with “new math” where two-plus-two equals “whatever I wish it to equal”. Facts and conventional calculations have never made a dent in the fad. The only thing that has slowed the train of goofiness toward economic oblivion has been Mother Nature’s demonstration since the global temperature peak 1998, although a couple of vicious winters now seem to be fading from public memory.
The Stern Review was just another dodgy dossier commissioned by Tony Blair to contain the conclusions that Blair wanted.
In the UK, all political parties support the following insane policies.
1. Energy – Huge, unsustainable subsidies on renewable energy, which is expensive, unreliable and requires gas turbine back up. Nuclear energy is effectively ignored, when it is the only practical solution, so no one is prepared to build a nuclear power station in the UK. In a few years from now, widespread brownouts and blackouts will kick in.
2. Water – conservation is the trendy buzzword. A few years ago five dams were going to be built in southern England to end the problems caused by occasional mini-droughts. These have all been quietly cancelled. It seems it is better for all the excess fresh water to flow uselessly into the sea rather than be used on land.
One of the things we unfortunately have to learn every time we go to war is you have to fire/push sideways all the top bureaucrats because of their management incompetence, empire building and inability to think pro-actively.
In essence, the real world is now at war with the global warming industry – we should be thankful that their leaders are all government, quasi-government bureaucrats, or failed politicians.
A commenter said above;
“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.”
Substitute the Stern Report for the Euro project and the truth of this comment can be seen. Our masters will throw any amount of our money at what were always nonsenses in order not to lose face and prestige.
tonyb
One thing worth mentioning is that Peter Lilley has a degree in Physics from Cambridge, unlike anybody in the previous Governments environmental policy unit. Who had NO science qualifications.
Here is a lesson from the past.
As for the people of 2200 let’s all hope they are still living in the warm and wonderful Holocene. 😉
tonyb says: September 4, 2012 at 1:06 am
Our masters will throw any amount of our money at what were always nonsenses in order not to lose face and prestige.
Hi Tony
In London we got fed up with the left wing newt Livingstone, so we elected a comedian, and guess what, to our surprise and delight he is doing good job, you even here people demand ‘Boris for PM’.
Friends:
The Stern Report was commissioned to be pure political propaganda. And it is surprising that Lord Lawson has taken so long to enable a serious rebuttal of it. I explain these facts as follows.
On 6 July 2005 the UK Parliament’s House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs published its report of its study into ‘The Economics of Climate Change’. The Committee was chaired by Lord Nigel Lawson and the report can be read in the Parliamentary Record at
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldselect/ldeconaf/12/12i.pdf
That report was scathing of the IPCC and determined that adaption to any climate change would be much less costly than any mitigation policies such as complying with the Kyoto Protocol.
The Select Committee Report provided a problem to the then UK government because
(a) the government had a constitutional duty to respond to the Select Committee Report
but
(b) the government had a policy of supporting the IPCC, the Kyoto Protocol and other mitigation policies (e.g. subsidies to windfarms).
The government solved its problem by commissioning Nicholas Stern to conduct a study which would assess the maximum possible costs if all the worst case scenarios (including some ridiculous scenarios) were to come true. Stern fulfilled his remit and provided the report of his ‘study’ a year later.
The government then hid behind the Stern report whenever there was mention of the Select Committee Report. And environmental groups have shouted about “findings” of the Stern Report whenever mention is made of the costs of addressing climate change.
But the Stern Report is – and was only intended to be – political propaganda for use as an excuse to avoid addressing the facts, analyses and conclusions in the report on ‘The Economics of Climate Change’ from the UK Parliament’s House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs.
Lord Lawson was Chairman of the UK Parliament’s House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs which provided its report on ‘The Economics of Climate Change’. He is now Chairman of the ‘Global Warming Policy Foundation’ (GWPF). Hence, it is surprising that GWPF has taken so long to commission a report which debunks the ridiculous contents of the Stern Report.
Richard
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.
I’m sure I remember my math(s) teacher at school saying that we are not allowed to multiply or divide by infinity. So how can a Harvard economist not understand this?
But then, surely, there is already a 100% certainty of an infinitely bad outcome for every one of us. The other certainty is taxes.
The Stern Review was instigated by the utterly mad psychotic and useless Gordon Brown, then chancellor.
Its whole purpose was probably to promote Brown’s position and control of the govt. It probably had very little indeed to do with climate change etc.
To his eternal credit, it was Peter Lilley, MP, who pointed out to the half-wits (I am being polite here people) in the venal House of Commons, during the so called onesided “debate” on the Climate Change Bill 2008, that it was snowing outside for the first time in London in October for over 70 odd years, (74 I think it was). Of course, the incumbents were too busy feathering their own nests & retirement plans to care about silly little things like, errrrr, facts! As they say, “& the reason we don’t rise up & slaughter them all is……………….?” We now have a perverse system where rich people get paid by rich (taxpayer subsidised) wind power companies, to build windmills that don’t work on their land, paid for by the taxpayer, who then have the pleasure of increased energy bills year on year, increasing “fuel poverty” that the half-wits & NGOs bang & drone on about, so we have more taxes to subsidise the increasing energy poor so that they can afford to pay their bills, increased by the taxes on the enrgy provided to them to prvide financial insentives for rich companies to pay rich people to have windmills built on their land…………! Circuitous argument or what?
I wanted to see what the fake Al Gore had to say
I stand corrected. It was Gordon Brown, not Blair who commissioned the Stern report.
we are truly buggered until we vote in individuals with the testicular fortitude to roll-back this nonsense. Shrink government, protect our borders and GET OUT OF THE WAY. We’ll do the rest…..
As Alan the Brit reminds us, Peter Lilley was one of the very few MPs who voted against the Climate Change Act. A sensible candidate for Energy Minister in the cabinet reshuffle that’s underway here, then…
“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”.”
Repeated “return”.
Apologies if this is a repeat of an earlier posting; I have skipped to the end.
IanM
Hmm.
I wrote an article for The Register (a/k/a/ “el reg”) on the Stern Review that covered just about all of this.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/22/global_warming_mitigation_vs_adaptation/print.html
I am also basing on the presumption that the IPCC is right (though I dot not think it is).