THE publication of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change certainly caused a stir in the press last month, predicting, as it did, a very bleak future unless we can get to grips with global warming.
It seems to have had most journalists, and the rest of the population, running around like headless chickens, so why has it left me so underwhelmed?

I am willing to accept, albeit with a healthy pinch of journalistic scepticism, that global warming exists and that the human race might be responsible for it, but I am somewhat put off by the tone of Sir Nicholas Stern’s report. I might be more inclined to believe Sir Nicholas Stern’s findings if the report wasn’t couched in such blatantly obvious political spin.

When the report sticks to the likely economic consequences of the various global warming assumptions as predicted by a number of, no doubt, eminent scientists, I have no problem. My concern is that Stern’s standpoint is to present these global warming predictions and forecasts as fact. Stern is an economist, a glorified accountant, he is not a geophysicist. So where does he get off lecturing us all about something of which he knows nothing?

The problem is it reminds me so much of the reports produced before the Iraq war on the supposed weapons of mass destruction. Being stuck in the car on February 5 2003, I caught the full text of Colin Powell’s report to the UN security council on Radio 5 Live. Anyone listening to this extensive address and the overwhelming weight of evidence against Saddam Hussein’s regime could not have failed to come to the conclusion that the only option for the US was to invade. In time, of course, we came to realise that the report contained not one shred of truth. Was it really a serious attempt to deceive the UN and the rest of the world (as if we would never find out the truth) or was the evidence presented by the US secret services really so horribly inaccurate?

Then, of course, we had the UK government’s own report into Iraq’s weapons capability which was eventually similarly discredited and then ripped to shreds amidst claims of being “sexed up” by the ill-fated weapons expert Dr David Kelly. Neither report contained the slightest vestige of truth or accuracy.

Based on this and our government’s track record of lies and spin, how are we supposed to give real credence to this latest report, particularly when its author presents as fact various environmental scenarios. Surely he should have examined the economic consequences of global warming as predicted by many eminent scientists from a dispassionate viewpoint?

I smell spin of the worst kind.

Neil Everitt

Editor