The economic costs of 'global warming' have been grossly overestimated, a leaked report - shortly to be published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - has admitted.
Previous reports - notably the hugely influential 2006 Stern Review - have put the costs to the global economy caused by 'climate change' at between 5 and 20 percent of world GDP.
But the latest estimates, to be published by Working Group II of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report, say that a 2.5 degrees Celsius rise in global temperatures by the end of the century will cost the world economy between just 0.2 and 2 percent of its GDP.
If the lower estimate is correct, then all it would take is an annual growth rate of 2.4 percent (currently it's around 3 percent) for the economic costs of climate change to be wiped out within a month.
This admission by the IPCC will come as a huge blow to those alarmists - notably the Stern Review's author but also including everyone from the Prince of Wales to Al Gore - who argue that costly intervention now is our only hope if we are to stave off the potentially disastrous effects of climate change.
Sir Nicholas (now Lord) Stern was commissioned by Tony Blair's Labour government to analyse the economic impacts of climate change. Stern, an economist who had never before published a paper on energy, the environment, or indeed climate change, concluded that at least two per cent of global GDP would need to be diverted to the war on global warming.
Stern's report has been widely ridiculed by economists, whose main criticism was that its improbably low discount rate placed an entirely unnecessary burden on current generations. Even if you accept the more alarmist projections of the IPCC's reports on "global warming", the fact remains that future generations will be considerably richer than our own - and therefore far more capable of mitigating the damages of climate change when or if they arise.
