Lord Stern: “Ignorant and reckless”

Lord Stern’s new book “Blueprint for a Safer Planet” has just been launched, with a broadside against the “sceptics”, who are “ignorant and reckless”.  He continues “the science is sound: greenhouse gases trap heat … the logic of the greenhouse effect is rock-solid”, and he proceeds to compare sceptics with those who deny the link between smoking and cancer, or between HIV and AIDS.
 
I suppose we should at least be grateful that unlike some hot-headed Warmists, at least he doesn’t compare us to Holocaust deniers.
 
Sadly, it is Lord Stern himself who is ignorant and reckless.  Ignorant of the science (he is, after all, an economist), and reckless with our prosperity.  He speaks as if the greenhouse effect were linear — that is, as if a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would lead to a doubling of the greenhouse effect.  That at least is a less egregious error than that of Al Gore, who in his disaster movie “An Inconvenient Truth” shows a graph implying that the greenhouse effect is exponential.
 
Yes, the science is solid.  But it shows a negative logarithmic relation between CO2 concentration and greenhouse effect.  A law of diminishing returns.  The higher the current level of CO2, the less effect any additional CO2 will have.  We have already reached a CO2 level where the gas, in greenhouse terms, has effectively shot its bolt.  We are on the flat section of the curve: further increases in CO2 will have a marginal effect.
 
If Stern doesn’t know this, at least the scientists at the IPCC know it: I have talked to them.  So they try to postulate speculative feed-back effects between CO2 and other trace gases, which might keep the Great Carbon Myth alive.  But they cannot demonstrate those effects.  They also know (as Stern appears unaware) that water vapour (which we cannot even start to control) is a more significant greenhouse gas than CO2; that human activity only contributes around 3 or 4% to the carbon cycle; and that without greenhouse gases the world would be locked in a permanent Ice Age.  The “Snowball Earth” would be a reality.
 
Tragically, Stern, an economist, is also wrong on the economics.  He keeps parroting the mantra “The costs of inaction are greater than the costs of mitigation”, yet most distinguished economists who have studied the question take the opposite view.  The British government’s cost/benefit analysis on its own climate and energy proposals shows costs exceeding benefits.  In his economic analysis, Stern made a number of schoolboy howlers, including a totally unrealistic long-term discount rate.  I’d rather trust Lord Lawson, who knew a bit about economics, and argues that adaptation, taking the limited steps necessary when and if it becomes clear that they are necessary, is a far more rational policy than Stern’s mitigation.
 
Stern’s plans threaten an economic meltdown (on top of the one we already have), but they will do nothing for the planet.  Maybe his book should be called “Blueprint for a Poorer Planet”.