Lord Stern is back into the climate fray, breathlessly telling us that...wait for it...it's worse than we thought. Isn't it always?
Lord Stern, the world’s most authoritative climate economist, has issued a stark warning that the financial damage caused by global warming will be considerably greater than current models predict.
This makes it more important than ever to take urgent and drastic action to curb climate change by reducing carbon emissions, he argues.
It's hard to credit the idea that Stern, alone among people working in this area, should merit a full-page article in a broadsheet newspaper, apart from the fact that his public pronouncements are reliably hysterical. It's also amazing that when climate economists like Nordhaus and Tol have, respectively, pooh-poohed the Stern review as a political document and as being devoid of academic merit, the Independent should choose to describe its author as "the world's most authoritative climate economist". This is like describing Wayne Rooney as the world's most glamorous ballet dancer.
Details on what Stern and colleagues have done in this new paper are thin on the ground, but they have clearly been upping the ante on the climate sensitivity front:
Whereas the standard model usually assumes a single temperature for climate sensitivity of about 3C, the new model uses a range of 1.5C to 6C, which the authors say more accurately reflects the scientific consensus.
If climate sensitivity is 6°C, how much warming should we have had since the middle of last century? It does look very much as a case of garbage in, garbage out.