Climate Research News

History re-written instead of re-writing Lord Stern’s report seriously damages the basis of current climate policy.

Disaster losses expert Roger Pileke Jr published a so far unchallenged critique of the influential ‘Stern Review’ in 2007. Table 5.2 of the Stern Review contained an order-of-magnitude error in Hurricane damage, which has been quietly corrected following the publication of Pielke Jr’s paper.

As Pielke Jr writes on his blog:

Excerpts:

“There is another important story in involving the Muir-Wood et al. 2006 paper that was misrepresented by the IPCC as showing a linkage between increasing temperatures and rising damages from extreme weather events. The Stern Review Report of the UK government also relied on that paper as the sole basis for its projections of increasing damage from extreme events. In fact as much as 40% of the Stern Review projections for the global costs of unmitigated climate change derive from its misuse of the Muir-Wood et al paper.”
“There is no note, no acknowledgment, nothing indicating that the estimated damage for hurricanes was modified after publication by an order of magnitude. The report was quietly changed to make the error go away. Of course, even with the Table corrected, now the Stern Review math does not add up, as the total GDP impact from USA, UK and Europe does not come anywhere close to the 1% global total for developed country impacts (based on Muir-Wood), much less the higher values suggested as possible in the report’s text, underscoring a key point of my 2007 paper.”

“Consequently, anyone wanting to understand or replicate my analysis from the original source would no doubt be confused because evidence of the error in Table 5.2 was quietly changed after the publication of my paper. Had they noted the error it would have obviously led to questions about the implications, and ultimately the bottom line estimates of the costs of unmitigated climate change. Rather than rewrite the report, apparently, it was decided instead to rewrite history. Fixing facts to fit a policy conclusion is not a good idea for any government, but to do so with the quiet participation of leading academic advisors is doubly bad. ”

Roger Pielke Jr’s blog: What a Tangled Web We Weave

CRN Comment: This is another astonishing development following the global warming science scandals of Climategate plus the admissions that the UN climate panel report contains a false claim about Himalayan glaciers and erroneously links natural disasters with global warming. The influential Stern Review, which has been unashamedly used to justify costly and restrictive climate policy, has been shown to be seriously flawed. Rather than admit to the errors and re-write the report, it seems to have been subjected to a fudged alteration in the hope that no one notices. How many more revelations will it take before our politicians admit that the climate policy ‘king’ has no clothes?

January 25th, 2010 | Tags: Climate Policy | Category: News | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL