Jim Manzi has noted earlier that the whole dust-up over Stern’s revolutionary treatment of “discount rates” bores him. I cannot really disagree. It all comes down to what even John Maynard Keynes noted while at Oxford: the immorality of present generations spending huge sums to protect wealthier future generations from hypothetical risks. And whatever Jim may say about accepting the science to show the Left how clever we are with better policies, the science and risk are increasingly hypothetical.

Now, this brings us to University of Hamburg economist Richard Tol, who noted of the Stern Report: “The discount rate used [how economists calculate present vs. future costs and benefits] is lower than the official recommendations by HM Treasury. Results are occasionally misinterpreted. The report claims that a cost-benefit analysis was done, but none was carried out. The Stern Review can therefore be dismissed as alarmist and incompetent.”

This is quite a statement given that Stern purported to rely heavily on Tol, citing him as an authority 63 times in his report. Such reflection is typically the highest form of flattery, but Tol wasn’t impressed, noting to the BBC he was more greatly impacted by the fact that “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.”

The charge of improper selectivity to achieve a particular result was not unique to the economists. Climate scientist Roger Pielke Jr., director of the University of Colorado’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, also noted “The Stern Report’s selective fishing out of a convenient statement from one of the background papers prepared for our workshop is a classic example of cherry picking a result from a diversity of perspectives, rather than focusing on the consensus of the entire spectrum of experts that participated in our meeting.”

Said Tol, “If a student of mine were to hand in this report as a master’s thesis, perhaps if I were in a good mood I would give him a D for diligence; but more likely I would give him an F for fail.”

Still, as with scientists rushing to defend An Inconvenient Truth with their version of “fake but accurate” arguments, sympathetic economists argued that that Stern’s estimates are reasonable, even if the method by which he reached them is subject to criticism. Stern himself seemed to sheepishly if implicitly acknowledge the defrocking he took as a result of these shenanigans, saying that “He believes that the forecasting of risk associated with the effects of climate change isn’t an issue for academics and policy makers to worry about. It’s here to stay and the time has come not for estimating the effects precisely, but to control the risk and mitigate the effects by climate change.” (Interview with Sir Nicholas Stern, The Economic Times, 5 November 2007)

Oh, these details are so tiresome. Can’t we just, you know, move on?

All of the expert assessment, however, matters not. Stern made clear that the full power of the government would be employed in the name of advancing this agenda, to the extent of even inventing new approaches in economic analysis. So, we see that the flagship report claiming to break new ground in justifying the climate-nanny state wasn’t actually based on any new economics, science, or modeling, but on deciding it was time to change the calculus, thus changing the conclusion.

The reason that extreme measures are crafted to advance the agenda and to accompany such counsel as Stern’s is obvious. As former Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, Alan Greenspan, wrote in his 2007 book, The Age of Turbulence:

There is no effective way to meaningfully reduce emissions without negatively impacting a large part of an economy. Net, it is a tax. If the cap is low enough to make a meaningful inroad into CO2 emissions, permits will become expensive and large numbers of companies will experience cost increases that make them less competitive. Jobs will be lost and real incomes of workers constrained.

Clearly, therefore, you’d better scare the people pretty well any time you address the economics of the global warming agenda, if the purpose of your pitch is to promote it.

Stern revealed his understanding of his role as an advocate when he seemingly dropped all pretense of proceeding as an economist in the aforementioned interview in the Economic Times. He swore to that publication how “Most of the greenhouse gases are emitted by the rich countries and they should bear the bulk of the carbon adjustment.” This is ideology, not only stripped of any patina of economic reasoning, but actually anti-economic in approach.

Stern’s first instinct, as an economist, should be to ask instead where and how might the greatest emission reductions come most cheaply? The answer there of course lies in technology transfer and assistance with clean economic growth in those countries experiencing the greatest emissions increases. Despite Europe’s spectacular (and let’s face it, humorous) Kyoto debacle, that actually does not mean the rich countries, but instead India, China, Mexico, Brazil, and so on.

Stern the ideologue insists instead that those of us in rich countries must experience pain for our sins, which approach has absolutely nothing to do with climate change or mitigation — even if one believes the alarmist case. All of this leaves one wondering if even Sir Nicholas does.

Finally, all of these precise critiques of the Stern Report’s conclusions – which is what received the media coverage, rather than his analysis, which was best served by avoiding the spotlight – should be considered in context with the revelation that the greens have airbrushed the past climatic record; abandoned the professionally accepted metric of purchasing power parity for market exchange rates when creating their projections of future climate, which also necessitates projecting economic growth [“convergence”] of the sort never before seen and utterly unlikely; and ignored emission and population trends when creating their future scenarios: failing to drop all that is accepted in favor of all that is convenient in order to deliver the desired outcomes.

Are these the tactics of a group confident in the merits of it has to say?