Halloween: Stern review

Last year, the alarmists would offer us a cute movie ClimateMash about the oil-drinking ghosts and zombies in the White House who would increase the number of hurricanes and melt all the snow on Earth.

Since 2005, the hurricane rate has dropped to roughly 30%. The temperatures have dropped since 2005, too. The alarmists have once again understood that the data from the real world is neither their cup of tea nor their ally and they returned to what they are best at: really dramatic, falsifiable predictions of the very same kind that the "critics of science" expect from the physicists. ;-)

It's the Halloween Day, 2006, and we are offered another ClimateMash called the Stern review. It's time for them to return to the well-established paradigm of the climate alarmism, originally coined by a former German minister of information: a lie repeated one hundred times becomes the truth. The sky is falling again.

A newer set of links to critiques of the Stern report can be found here.

As William Connolley has pointed out, Stern's economic numbers don't seem to be right according to Tim Worstall. Roger Pielke, Jr., argues that Stern is cherry-picking. Nevertheless, Sir Nicholas Stern uses some miraculous math to argue that the cost of failing to act on the climate change is 3.68 trillion pounds - note the breathtaking accuracy of his result. ;-)

That's a very impressive number but what is not said is that the cost of trying to fight with the climate change is 10 trillion pounds. I, for one, would prefer to save 6.32 trillion pounds and even arrest some people like Sir Stern if necessary in order to make this saving possible: I think that spreading this kind of false alarm is a crime in the Czech Republic, so once Sir Stern appears there, the police should act.

Stern claims that the temperature increase will be 2-5 Celsius degrees. William Connolley observes that Sir Stern has probably rounded up the "consensus" numbers 1.5-4.5 Celsius degrees. That's not the only fraud in the report: similar problems occur with other numbers. James Annan, another climate scientist, doesn't like the Stern report either although one might conjecture that it is mostly because he is not sufficiently referred to by the report. ;-)

According to OPEC, the report is unfounded. The Australian prime minister John Howard has also dismissed it. He will not give up the natural advantages of his country and he opposes action that wouldn't include India and China. Bjorn Lomborg is skeptical about the conclusions, too.

Incidentally, Connolley who is a former alarmist himself, has also pointed out that whenever those 25,000 frozen Britons in 2005 are discussed, the climate change is never mentioned. The situation is very different in the case of heatwaves.