Global Warming and Nicholas Stern

Global warming is a phenomenon which seems to have occurred. The reasons for it are another matter. The answers to it are yet another. Nicholas Stern is an economist and a patter merchant who knows nothing about the subject but has taken the position wanted by his paymasters. There are other more sensible people out there. Here are some.

Global Warming Front Man Is Bean Counter [ 1 November 2006  ]
What does he know about global warming? NOTHING! He is a Jewish patter merchant but he produced a 700 page report on it. Brown hired him. Stern tells him what he wants to hear. Blair is using him as an excuse for higher taxes. That is what they are serious about.
PS He is also one of the 364 economists who wrote a letter to The Times in 1981and were proved completely and utterly wrong. See How 364 economists got it totally wrong  Why should anyone believe a word he says ?

 

Economics has a very generous helping of fools says Milton Friedman
QUOTE
All battles are perpetual. You go back in the literature of economics, and you’ll find the same kind of silly statements 100 years ago, 200 years ago. And you’ll find the same sensible statements the other way. […] There’s no short cut. There’s no way in which you’re going to end the discussion, because new generations arise; every group has the same crazy ideas. I get a great many letters from people who think that the way to solve budget problems and fiscal problems is to simply print money and pay off the debt. And there’s almost no way of making those people realize just what a bunch of nonsense that is. I’m inclined to think that there’s no field so rife with cranks as currency and money, but I’m sure there are other fields that are just as bad. I’m just ignorant of them.
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Nicholas Stern is an economist so do not believe him on any issue of importance like global warming.

 

The economics and politics of climate change
by Nigel Lawson
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But first, a very brief comment on Stern. If scaremongering seems a trifle harsh, I should point out that, as a good civil servant, he was simply doing his masters’ bidding. As Mr Blair’s guru, Lord Giddens (the inventor of the so-called third way), laid down in this context in a speech last year, "In order to manage risk, you must scare people". In fact, the voluminous Stern Report adds disappointingly little to what was already the conventional wisdom – apart from a battery of essentially spurious statistics based on theoretical models and conjectural worst cases. This is clearly no basis for policy decisions which could have the most profound adverse effect on people’s lives, and at a cost which Stern almost certainly underestimates. It is, in a very real sense, the story of the Iraq war, writ large.

So let us get back to basics, and seek the answers to three questions, of increasing complexity. First, is global warming occurring? Second, if so, why? And third, what should be done about it?
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Nigel Lawson does not know much about geology but he knows a lot about politics and even more about dodgy bean counters. I back his judgment on this one.

 

Christopher Pearson says Hotheads warned, cool it
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JOHN Howard's [ the Australian Prime Minister - Editor ] new position on greenhouse gas emissions is a bitter disappointment to many of his supporters, but it comes as no surprise.... an opinion poll found 70per cent of Australians were worried about global warming. Perhaps no prime minister seeking another term in office these days can hope to withstand that tide of public opinion, irrespective of the merits of the case..........

Summing up, [ see the previous article - Editor ] Lawson detects two main dangers in "the new religion of eco-fundamentalism", apart from the needless havoc it may wreak on some developed nations' economies. The first is that "the global salvationist movement is profoundly hostile to capitalism and the market economy ... Given the fact that the only way in which the world's poor will ever be able to escape from their poverty is by embracing capitalism and the global market economy, this is not good news."
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Greenies of today would have been religious agitators in an earlier century. The slogans have changed. The lust for power has not any more than the arrogant belief that they know better; their views are based on a solid foundation of ignorance.