Nicholas Stern, Global Warming Guru, In Hot Water

Posted on Wed 10/26/2016 by

Bolt New 01

By Andrew Bolt ~

One of the most influential warming alarmists (and an Australian ABC darling)  hasn’t just wildly exaggerated the dangers of global warming.

Sir Nicholas Stern’s Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy also exaggerated the work it’s done – claiming cash from the British Government by boasting of research it never did:

One of the world’s leading institutes for researching the impact of global warming has repeatedly claimed credit for work done by rivals – and used it to win millions from the taxpayer.

An investigation by The Mail on Sunday also reveals that when the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (CCCEP) made a bid for more Government funds, it claimed it was responsible for work that was published before the organisation even existed. Last night, our evidence was described by one leading professor whose work was misrepresented as ‘a clear case of fraud – using deception for financial gain’.

The chairman of the CCCEP since 2008 has been Nick Stern, a renowned global advocate for drastic action to combat climate change. . .

Part of the CCCEP’s official mission, which it often boasts about in its public reports, is to lobby for the policies Lord Stern advocates by presenting the case for them with British and foreign governments and at UN climate talks.

Last night, CCCEP spokesman Bob Ward admitted it had ‘made mistakes’, both in claiming credit for studies which it had not funded and for papers published by rival academics. ‘This is regrettable, but mistakes can happen… We will take steps over the next week to amend these mistakes,’ he said.

Stern’s institute claimed a paper of Richard Tol, a leading environmental economist, as one of its own:

The paper cited by the CCCEP of which Prof Tol is a co-author was published online by the Ecological Economics journal on July 31, 2008.

At the time, he and the lead author, David Anthoff, were on the staff of the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin.

Their co-author, Cameron Hepburn, was at Oxford University. The research on ‘the marginal costs of climate change’ was funded by the European Commission and the Stockholm Environment Institute. . .

Prof Tol said: ‘Our paper had no relationship to the CCCEP. It came out of David Anthoff’s masters thesis. At the time, the CCCEP did not exist, and it only came into existence after the paper was published. Fraud means deception for financial gain. That is what this is.’

Stern’s centre even claimed credit for work done by Australian researchers funded by Australian taxpayers:

…an online record of CCCEP publications updated monthly and published on the government’s research funding website, Gateway To Research, is equally questionable – suggesting the CCCEP has for years been inflating its reputation and the scale of its activity unjustifiably…

For example, in 2011 Kersty Hobson, then at Oxford and now a professor at Cardiff, was lead author of a paper entitled Public Responses to Climate Change. Her co-author Simon Niemeyer was at the Australian National University in Canberra.She told The Mail on Sunday: ‘This paper had nothing whatsoever to do with the CCCEP. It was completely funded by the Australian Research Council.’

Tim Blair points out he was onto Stern years ago.

Indeed, for a decade it has been clear that Stern has a terrible tendency to wildly exaggerate the danger of global warming – which may explain why he was an ABC favorite:

But now even the BBC has found that Stern’s argument is based on a lot of hot air, too. Highlights from its program The Investigation:Global Warming meltdown

The Stern Review may have been loved by the politicians and headline writers but when climate scientists and environmental economists read the 670-page review, many said there were serious flaws.

These critics are not climate change sceptics, but researchers with years of experience who believe that human-induced climate change is real and that we need to act now. –Simon Cox and Richard Vadon, BBC Radio 4, The Investigation, 25 January 2007

Stern consistently picks the most pessimistic for every choice that one can make. He overestimates through cherry-picking, he double counts particularly the risks and he underestimates what development and adaptation will do to impacts… There is a whole range of very basic economics mistakes that somebody who claims to be a Professor of Economics simply should not make. –Richard Tol, Hamburg University, 25 January 2007

If you look inside the Stern Review you find that he suggests that the most severe impacts of climate change would have the effect of reducing consumption by 35% in the year 2200. But at the same time elsewhere, the Stern Report suggests that baseline economic growth will be 12 times higher in the year 2200 – which means that we will have GDP 12 times higher in the year 2200. So even if we didn’t do anything about climate change, the Stern Review seems to suggest that still we would be eight times richer by the year 2200 than we are today. So if you are concerned about equal treatment of generations, some people might say that the best thing to do about climate change is nothing. This is not a view that I subscribe to. But it seems to be a logical conclusion if you read Stern carefully. –David Maddison, Birmingham University, 25 January 2007

As the Spectator reported last week [2007], Stern claimed we could tackle global warming by sacrificing just one per cent of the planet’s economic output – but based his cheery message on figures too wild for even the IPCC, that temple of global warming alarmism on which he actually relied for his paper:

While conducting the report, Sir Nicholas and his team knew something they even now cannot admit. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the recognised world authority on whose work the Stern review was itself based, is preparing its own review on climate change economics. It calculates that the 550 ppm target would cost up to 5 per cent of economic output, five times the loss Stern suggests…

The BBC also confronted Stern on this very point:

Nick Stern: “We’ve drawn on the basic science. We have not tried to do new scientific research. We’re not scientists.”

Simon Cox (BBC): “I just wonder why your figures are different if you’ve just drawn from the existing literature, why your figures would be different from the IPCC”?

Nick Stern: “The IPCC is a good process, but it has to depend on consensus. It means that they have to be quite cautious in what they say.”

Global Warming PoliticsYet 10 years ago, Stern was influential in making the Australian Labor Party push the catastrophist line:

Labor’s environment spokesman, catastrophist Peter Garrett, was one of the many unquestioning fans of last year’s hugely influential Stern report on global warming. How Garrett loved Sir Nicholas Stern’s demands we spend trillions now to avoid apocalypse tomorrow:

“The Prime Minister has long argued that Australia’s economic interests would be damaged by ratifying Kyoto and getting serious about reducing emissions but the Stern report shows just the opposite – namely, that the economic consequences of failure to actwould be catastrophic, with estimates of damage costing up to 25 per cent of global GDP. The cost of inaction by this government is that high.”

This year he was still promoting the Australian politician who’d given him rapt attention:

The world would “do very well to have” Kevin Rudd as United Nations Secretary General (UNSG) and “Australia ought to be proud to have him as a candidate,” one of the world’s leading economists says.

Lord Nicholas Stern has given the former prime minister a glowing endorsement ahead of Mr Rudd’s expected official nomination for the job in coming months…

“He’s got all the skills plus leadership and he’s a man that people trust.”

Lord Stern has worked with Mr Rudd for nearly a decade and extremely closely on climate change… Lord Stern said Mr Rudd had helped lead the global debate on climate change.

Andrew Bolt writes for the Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph, and The Advertiser and runs Australia’s most-read political blog. On week nights he hosts The Bolt Report on Sky News at 7pm and his Macquarie Radio show at 8pm with Steve Price.

Read more excellent articles from Andrew Bolt’s Blog . http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/


 

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