For more on tomorrow’s star witness Sir Nicholas Stern, consider that even his own paper, when stripped of it bombast and the call for massive increases in governmental intervention in energy-related markets, affirms that:

* Humanity would be better off in a high-growth globalized “Business as Usual” (BAU) world with climate change (even the worst-case story lines he selects) than in a fully mitigated, regionalized world like the Greens seek.

* The social cost of carbon dioxide that Stern selected implies that most European countries are already raising more than enough from energy taxes to account for the externalities.

* The world in 2100 will be vastly richer no matter what and therefore better able to deal with what we will always face – always unpredictable, often severe weather.

* The question is therefore why we ought to suddenly harm our own wealth creation – and thereby theirs – in the name of expensive gestures?

These shortcomings, which did not make it into the breathless media promotion of Stern’s alarmism and advocacy, put the kibosh on his argument, revealing an almost certainly predetermined outlier conclusion.

As expected then — and to be expected tomorrow — gobal-warmists could not resist the temptation to exaggerate and invoke Stern for whatever claim they were selling at the moment. For example, while UK Conservative Party advisor and environmental activist Zac Goldsmith (whose face should be on milk cartons throughout the UK, having disappeared from the Tory scene with the energy price spike) claimed that “Nicholas Stern calculated in his report last year that there will be more than 200 million refugees by 2050 because of sea-level rise alone,” the fact is, “Stern ‘calculates’ no such thing. He merely cites a 12-year old study, which he admits has not been rigorously tested.”

More, momentarily.