From the May/June 2009 issue of The National Interest.
Nicholas Stern, The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009), 256 pp., $26.95.
Nicholas Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 712 pp., $52.00.
Forests are currently being felled to print a raft of new books on global warming. They all address three big questions: Is it really happening? Does it matter? What can we do about it? I am going to focus on Nicholas Stern's new book, The Global Deal. That is because, like my friend Lord Stern, I am an economist. As such, neither of us has any special insights as to whether it is really happening. Perhaps the whole mountain of concern is analogous to the now-forgotten millennium bug which was supposedly going to destroy our computer-based economy. The British government spent billions of pounds trying to fix the problem; the less organized Italian government didn't get round to doing anything. In the event, the date changed from 1999 to 2000 with not a single computer problem anywhere. But we cannot count on global warming to be like the millennium bug; let's hope that it is, but we should plan that this time the weight of scientific opinion is broadly right. Indeed, the less reliable the science, the more we should be worried: global warming could possibly be much worse than the central forecasts.
