"Call For Action" or "Dodgy Numbers" on Climate Change?

Reading the British papers you’d think that it was all over bar shouting. The Stern Review conducted for the British government by Sir Nicholas Stern recommends that the British spend 1 percent of GDP on climate change policies. The cost of inaction, the report advises, could reach as high as 20 percent of global GDP.

Prime Minister Tony Blair hailed the report as a call to action saying the document "demolished the last remaining argument for inaction in the face of climate change."

But Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, is skeptical. Writing in OpinionJournal.com he accuses Stern of “dodgy numbers.”

The review correctly points out that climate change is a real problem, and that it is caused by human greenhouse-gas emissions. Little else is right, however, and the report seems hastily put-together, with many sloppy errors. As an example, the cost of hurricanes in the U.S. is said to be both 0.13% of U.S. GDP and 10 times that figure.

The report attempts to quantify the social damage cost of carbon dioxide.

The most well-recognized climate economist in the world is probably Yale University's William Nordhaus, whose "approach is perhaps closest in spirit to ours," according to the Stern review. Mr. Nordhaus finds that the social cost of CO2 is $2.50 per ton. Mr. Stern, however, uses a figure of $85 per ton.

But of course, the facts aren’t really all that important. Climate change politics is all about testing to see whether people are willing to countenance an increase in government influence and control. In Britain, it seems that they are, as both major parties compete to see who is the greenest.

There was another report issued recently about climate change. It was Lomborg’s own Copenhagen Consensus 2006.

Last weekend in New York, I asked 24 U.N. ambassadors--from nations including China, India and the U.S.--to prioritize the best solutions for the world's greatest challenges, in a project known as Copenhagen Consensus. They looked at what spending money to combat climate change and other major problems could achieve. They found that the world should prioritize the need for better health, nutrition, water, sanitation and education, long before we turn our attention to the costly mitigation of global warning.

You can get information on Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus here.