… And Chicken Little
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Given Britons’s clime it’s easy to see why they would take a dour view of the weather, but even by that standard the Stern Report on global warming is something else. The book-length analysis of the economic ramifications of climate change, prepared by a panel led by a former World Bank economist, Sir Nicholas Stern, is as bleak as any overcast winter day in London. It’s only a matter of time before some start trying to use the report as another excuse to criticize the Bush administration for its supposedly insufficient zeal for changing the weather.
The marquee conclusion reckons we can devote a total of about 1% of the global economy to cutting greenhouse gas emissions now or pay for our inaction later in the form of a global economy 20% smaller each year than it otherwise would be. That shrinkage would come, the report declares, as a result of the costs of climate-related disruptions like coastal flooding and agricultural changes. The report estimates that some preventative action could end up saving the world economy $2.5 trillion a year.
The Stern panel had many estimates of the costs of addressing climate change today and the possibly future effects from which to choose, but it has uniformly taken the most pessimistic assumptions. That’s true both for its projections of future emissions, culled from a United Nations report that provided a range of models, and of the possible costs, which it extracted from among a variety of possibilities in a paper that was presented at a recent academic conference.
Do the report’s numbers even mean what they appear to signify? Take the 20% figure. Global warming will only become that costly, if it ever does, in 2200. By 2100, meantime, the report’s numbers assume the world economy will be between five times and 10 times larger than it is today, even after making the assumption that free trade and its attendant efficiencies end. It means only that today we face a choice between our descendants being stinking rich or only merely filthy rich, as a scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Iain Murray, put it to us.
Not that it’s even our choice to make. The world has been cooling and warming in cycles for millennia. For the past two million years, the norm has been an ice age of 100,000 years followed by a thaw followed by another ice age, an atmospheric physicist, S. Fred Singer, wrote in a recent issue of World Economics in respect of an article by Sir Nicholas. There are also smaller cycles involving less drastic changes. During a warm spell in the Middle Ages, it was possible to farm on much of Greenland.
Mr. Singer also notes that there’s no clear causal relationship between warming and carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide has always varied naturally, reaching levels 10 times as great as today about 500 million years ago before starting to fall. Yet while more carbon dioxide is associated with warmer climates, the gas doesn’t cause the heat. The climate cooled between 1940 and 1975 even as carbon dioxide emissions were reaching new highs.
So the Stern Review, dubious science, is about politics. In Britain, the report is being used by the Labor government to shore up its environmental credentials ahead of an election when Labour’s chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, will be competing against a Conservative, David Cameron, who presents himself as greener. It could also be an attempt by Europeans, who have already spent a lot of money implementing the Kyoto Protocols, to browbeat Mr. Bush into signing off America’s competitive advantage by accepting the protocols, too. It’s to Mr. Bush’s credit that he has resisted this effort in the past.