In 2006, Professor Nicholas Stern produced a report on climate at the request of the British Government. It claimed that climate-related damage would dramatically increase in coming years and was hugely influential at the time. Two years later, Parliament passed the Climate Change Act, the seminal legislation that put Britain on its disastrous path to Net Zero. Seventeen years later, the U.S. economist Professor Roger Pielke observes that Stern’s predictions of climate and weather impacts were only true in one year – 2017 – and in dollar terms the cumulative overestimation in financial damage to date is about $1 trillion.
At the time, the economist Ruth Lea has probably never written a truer word. She told readers of the Daily Telegraph that “I have little doubt that the Government will use the Stern report as a political prop, under the guise of the moral case for saving the planet, for unilaterally raising energy costs”. In the years that followed, successive British Governments did just that, reducing a commitment to cheap local fossil fuel, and promoting unreliable green energy with massive subsidies paid by British consumers.
The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change was a major exercise in green scare propaganda highlighting an improbable increase in global temperatures of up to 5°C. Noted Lea: “In Stern’s worst case scenario, global GDP by the end of the century would be 20% lower than would be the case if climate change had been tackled.” She quoted Stern, who said “our actions could create risks of major disruptions to economic and social activity on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century”.
Professor Pielke noted that Stern reported correctly that weather and climate disasters over the decades leading to 2005 totalled around 0.2% of global GDP. Stern made two assumptions of future increases. A lower bound of constant 2% increases in the costs of extreme weather over and above changes in wealth and inflation, and an upper bound assuming a rate of increase of 1% each decade reaching 6% in 2045. Stern said that these values are “likely underestimates”, but the following graph shows that they were not.
In the lower bound example, the grey bars show the expected loss increase from 0.2% of GDP to about 0.35%. The actual losses are shown in black and the dashed linear trend line has hardly moved. Only the one year in 2017 was higher than Stern’s forecast, and Pielke computes the cumulative financial error over the 17 years at no less than $1 trillion. He notes that Stern’s failed prediction “is good news for the world”.
Pielke also compiles a second graph showing the results from the upper bound estimates. These guesses soar quickly but there is no evidence from current loss patterns that that reality will make its presence felt. But then with global warming slowing to barely a 0.1°C rise since the turn of the century, there is not a great deal of reality about Stern’s 5°C temperature hike. Pielke’s observations would seem to undermine the “simple conclusion” of the Stern review that, “the benefits of strong and early action far outweigh the economic costs of not acting”.
These days Professor Stern is the chair of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at the London School of Economics. Grantham is a promotional research operation committed to accelerating the transition to Net Zero, and it is backed by numerous green billionaire foundations. Its main backer is the green billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham. Stern is still promoting his report, bizarrely telling an audience in October 2021 that his work, “contrary to being alarmist, underestimated the risks, the damage associated with temperatures increasing, and the probability of temperature increases”. It was said to be important to keep going down to zero carbon dioxide by mid-century. Renewables, with storage, he fantasised, now competed without subsidy or carbon price in much of the world. The fact that you can’t store renewables at any worthwhile scale does not seem to have occurred to Stern.
Back in 2006 when Stern’s report was first published, the environmental economist Professor Richard Tol observed: “If a student of mine were to hand in this report as a Master’s thesis, perhaps if I were in a good mood I would give him a ‘D’ for diligence; but more likely an ‘F’ for fail. … Stern consistently picks the most pessimistic for every choice that one can make. He overestimates through cherry-picking, he double counts particularly the risks, and he underestimates what development and adaptation will do to impacts.”
But does any of that matter? Stern was important green nudge propaganda at the time paving the way for a radical collectivist transformation of society through the Net Zero project.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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$1 Trillion only? That is the per annum funds available for this cult. Huge business. Reality matters not. Data integrity is old fashioned. Rigorous analysis is only done by white extremists. What matters is massive fraud, propaganda, end of this or that, worst-ever and we-are-doomed. Footnotes source the doom goblin Thunturd, the UN, Al Whore and Greenwar.
As Tol says in the article (he calls the UN IPCC a sausage making non scientific process and he might be the most cited researcher within it), it would fail as a master’s thesis. Ergo it must be $cience. Do it Pravda style.
‘Professor Stern is the chair of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at the London School of Economics….main backer is the green billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham.’
‘Jeremy Grantham is…..using his to power the development of green technology. The Grantham Foundation has invested into 45 early-stage green projects, such as improving the efficiency of lithium extraction.’
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jeremy-grantham/
Just a simple old fashioned crude attempt at ‘cornering the market’
What kind of incentive scheme does Stern have………
The incentive is that he keeps his funding.
You are forgetting the interest free loan of up to £2,000 towards the purchase of a new bike……
The scientifically-illiterate morons in Parliament haven’t got the guts to stand up to the Climate Propagandists.
They have their salaries, expenses and careers to think of. Most know that they couldn’t possibly command the kind of money they get from dutifully trooping through “the right” lobby in the private sector.
It will be up to the British people to kick back ….. and we’ve just had a clear demonstration of how likely that is with their meek compliance with the Covid lunacy.
Everything you hear about what climate change is going to do is almost always never the case once you investigate further. But most ordinary people busy with work and family life do not have the time to investigate every single issue. They mostly assume that science is all conducted in a professional manner and don’t really realise the extent to which politics interferes in the issue of climate. Or as someone once said “Who pays the piper calls the tune”———- Take the issue of sea level rise. We have heard many times how towns and coastlines will be inundated, and storm surges will cause havoc, all apparently due to our CO2 emissions causing climate change. What we mostly will not hear is that the coastline of England is sinking by about half the rate at which sea level is rising there. Sea level rise is currently 7 inches per century. Hardly any kind of catastrophe. Sea level rise is also very very slow, and as happens in Holland measures are able to be taken to prevent damage.—— Almost everything that happens these days gets blamed on “climate change”. This is NOT scientific. When claims are made that cannot be falsified, they are NOT science. Climate models full of assumptions that so far have all been wrong continue to be wheeled out to justify climate policies, but if anyone dares to point this out, the whole climate industrial complex including the bought and paid for mainstream media form a pincer movement to harass and name call all the “deniers”. ——–But in the issue of climate there is something called ECS (Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity) This determines whether warming from CO2 is likely to be large or not. If the number for ECS is high then we will get some warming, but if the number is small, then we get very little warming. Here is the absurd thing though,——-The correct number for ECS is NOT KNOWN. Governments all over the wealthy west are basing policy on the output from models where even the most basic parameter in UNKNOWN and many others are simply guessed at. So no wonder the models have all been totally wrong. ——–Climate Change is Politics. It is the politics of the UN and it’s Sustainable Development. Most people have no clue what this even means, and if they don’t educate themselves soon then all of their hard won freedoms will be GONE. No MP in Parliament asked a single question about the cost or the benefit of NET ZERO—-WHY? —-The cost is astronomical (al paid for by you and ), and the benefit is virtually NONE.
The forecast looks like exponential growth, no more needs to be said.
Grantham needs his green forecasts and bets to work, as most of his other ones have been quite dismal during the last 2 decades.
The broken clock that is right twice a day comes to mind when looking at his bearish forecasting and at his performance record.
He is another one of those who have produced negative capital-weighted returns for their investors, like Paulsen and Carmignac, and who should therefore not be billionaires.
But unfortunately, that is how the active management and hedge fund system is set up, and too many, especially ‘professionals’ like pension fund managers, still fall for it: outperform big time with some huge directional bets, often even made in both directions in separate vehicles, when you are small, and then see the billions pour into your winning bet (folding the loser), then take your huge cuts and slowly burn these billions. The investors billions, not your own, of course. Yours are put away safely in foundations, art collections etc..
One would like to think that Dr David “Snow is a thing of the past” Viner is a thing of the past. Whether or not he is, his ghost lives on in the UN. What we need now is an exorcist. https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2022/12/12/david-viner-is-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-3/
Ironically, 2000 was the year when it started snowing again after years-long period without snow.
Fortune telling.
How can anyone now possibly know what ‘damage’ weather will do?
This assumes they know what the weather will be and assumes that technology will not advance, that future generations will not adapt.
Although not weather related but certainly environment related, the Thames Flood Barrier was built to stop high surge tides flooding London.
Building technology advanced to reduce building collapse during earthquakes. We can no build building taller than ever.
We can now heat our homes and water from a central gas burning appliance. We can keep our homes cool in Summer with air-con units.
Fewer lives are lost due to severe weather events than ever before.
These are things 100 years ago our ancestors could not imagine.
I don’t know if this has been posted before, but here seems appropriate:
Challenging “Net Zero” with Science
https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:4a52e6bf-f7f5-3d75-9f72-851010ab76c4
There is no doubt that the climate change industry is massive and, like many other issues today, opposing it is at one’s peril. However, the Heritage Party is prepared to do just that. Anybody want to stick their neck out and support it?
I would be more than happy to support it if they stood in my ward.
And no doubt the Media might give full support to a party pointing out the bare faced lies that they have been promoting for 20 years or more.
Or maybe not.
Even the Brexit Party never got a seat in Parliament, despite far greater support than the LimpDims, the Greens and the rest ever received.
Did you ever wonder if our “elections” were designed to be “fair”?
“But does any of that matter? Stern was important green nudge propaganda at the time paving the way for a radical collectivist transformation of society through the Net Zero project.”
I wonder if Stern’s bank accounts have a tad more in them than honest Richard Tol’s?
Something else to thank those economic geniuses Bliar & Brown for.
Some are getting rich from the ‘Climate Change’ industry.