<Discover's Top Science Story # 52: Breath of Reality

"As more scientific evidence shows that CO2 is heating up the globe, naysayers have turned to economics to bolster their argument that little should be done. For example, Lawrence B. Lindsey, President Bush's assistant for economic policy, says the Kyoto Protocol, which calls on nations to limit their CO2 production, "could damage our collective prosperity and, in so doing, put our long-term environmental health at risk." Yale economist William Nordhaus developed a model that shows just keeping the amount of CO2 in the air from doubling in 100 years would cost the world about $18 trillion. However, this year Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University and editor of the journal Climatic Change, used the Nordhaus model as well as more recent models to demonstrate that containing CO2 wouldn't be nearly as expensive as many economists have suggested.

Schneider says $18 trillion might sound like a lot when compared with the $20 trillion world economic output of 1990, but he insists "you can't use future numbers and compare them to today's economy. That's bait and switch. You can't, on the one hand, grab the models and say it's going to cost us trillions and trillions of dollars but ignore the fact that the very same models say we're going to have a $300 trillion economy in 100 years." Spread the cost of reducing fossil-fuel consumption over the next century, and it turns out that the world would reach the same level of prosperity in 102 years that it is now projected to reach in 100. Schneider says that's a cheap insurance policy to limit "the use of the atmosphere as a free sewer."
— Michael Abrams

Gee who would have guessed GW avoiders would misrepresent the economic numbers to scare people into doing nothing? Coming soon "Applying Baloney Detector to Habitablezone's top ten stupid GW comments"

Regards,
Mark