Customer Reviews

The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review

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This is a very important document on climate change and has won the respect of experts around the world. It was commissioned by the British government in 2005. It took two years to complete and was headed by Nicholas Stern, the former Chief Economist of the World Bank. You may or may not agree with all its findings but it remains one of the most professional studies of whole climate change situation, integrating global economic realities with science. Stern has written a less expensive book of his views that came out in 2009 The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity. I would also recommend Lester Brown's Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (Substantially Revised).

This is a great book for a Ph.D. econometrician, but it sucks big time for the typical reader. Reading it is like plowing a field of rock with a horse drawn plow with a dull blade.

However, for Ph.D.s and Master degreed researches it is wonderful because it is data-filed and does the best job with the science at hand. It shows how climate change can impact the world more than all the wars in history put together.

But someone needs to write this book for the typical interested reader. The Plan B book does a better job in this regard, but Plan B is not as valuable for egg-heads.

This is not a book you will enjoy reading, it will be a pain in the neck and you will put it down over and over and need to come back to it. But it has such valuable information you will find the need to return to it over and over if this is your field.

This 692 page treatise on the subject of climate change was commissioned by the New Labour Party in the UK and written by Nicholas Stern [since elevated to the Peerage]of the Cabinet Office-H M Treasury and is popularly known as 'The Stern Review'. This tome is well prepared and copiously illustrated with colourful charts and diagrams; it is dated 2006 and was first published in paperback form in 2007.

This book was a great influence upon the politicians, particularly the 650 MPs that represent the British political constituencies; they voted the 2008 Climate Change Act onto the statute book in the belief that this text and the academic, peer reviewed, published papers on the subject were correct, many are referenced at the end of each chapter.

The interpretation of the science of climate change has been modified since 2006; much of the alarm and hype about the effects of the changes on Earth's environment through anthropogenic global warming and CO2 emissions have been mitigated by later study, scientific data and meteorological facts.

For example Stern says 'Some estimates suggest that 150-200 million people may become permanently displaced by the middle of the century due to rising sea levels, more frequent floods, and more intense droughts' This would require global temperature increases well beyond those projected in current computer models, in the +3 - +4 degree centigrade range. Whereas data collected since 1950 indicates that global temperature averages actually increased by no more than one half a degree centigrade, and this during a period of so-called warming.

Students of climate change should regard The Stern Review as an example of how a government can influence an outcome by a text written and presented in an authoritative way. It is now out-of-date and ridiculed by many academics of the environment and climate change. Read and understand the subject fully and you will consider this book to be the politicised version of how climate change was set to become the major concern of the 21st century.

Dr Nicholas Stern was formerly the World Bank's chief economist, so he has huge experience of faulty forecasts. His 2006 review has become the most influential global warming report, embraced by the Blair and Brown governments. He appeared to bring hard-sounding economic calculations into the world of scientific predictions and guesses.
Yet his report is now wholly discredited. Dr. Richard Tol, Principal Researcher at the Institute for Environmental Studies at Vrije Universiteit, and Adjunct Professor at the Center for Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change, at Carnegie Mellon University, called it `preposterous'.
Crucially, Stern estimated the cost of additional carbon emissions as $29 a ton, as against Tol's conclusion that the costs were `likely to be substantially smaller' than $14 a ton. Tol said, "In sum, the Stern Review is very selective in the studies it quotes on the impacts of climate change. The selection bias is not random, but emphasises the most pessimistic studies ... Results are occasionally misinterpreted. The report claims that a cost-benefit analysis was done, but none was carried out. The Stern Review can therefore be dismissed as alarmist and incompetent."