Douglass and Knox also reported that the short intrinsic climate response time that they had derived (6.8 ± 1.5 months) “confirms suggestions of Lindzen and Giannitsis (1998, 2002) that a low sensitivity and small lifetime are more appropriate” than the “long response times and positive feedback” assumed in the AOGCMs. They concluded that “Hansen et al.'s hope that the dramatic Pinatubo climate event would provide an ‘acid test’ of climate models has been fulfilled, although with an unexpected result.”

The present calculations strongly support the contention that the time-difference between the transient and equilibrium responses to radiative forcings and climate feedbacks is intra-decadal and perhaps intra-annual, and is very unlikely to be supra-centennial. If the difference is indeed of months rather than of years, then the magnitude of the equilibrium response has fully manifested itself in the observed temperature record.

However, it is possible that in the past half-century the Sun has been more active than at any time in the previous 11,400 years. Solanki et al. (2005) report that “during the past 11,400 years the Sun spent only of the order of 10% of the time at a similarly high level of magnetic activity and almost all of the earlier high-activity periods were shorter than the present episode.” They say, “The rarity of the current episode of high average sunspot numbers may indicate that the Sun has contributed to the unusual climate change during the twentieth century.” But they point out that solar variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the strong warming during the past three decades.

If Solanki et al. are right, the solar forcing assumed here, already a little higher than that assumed by the IPCC, might be greater still, either lengthening the duration of the period between transient and equilibrium response or suggesting that the forcings and climate feedbacks — many of which the IPCC acknowledges are little-understood — may be overstated in the UN’s models.

We are attempting to model an object — the climate — that is chaotic in the mathematical sense and is hence unpredictable by definition unless not only all relevant climatic processes and interactions but also the initial state of the climate at any chosen instant are known in detail to a very high degree of precision.

Lorenz (1963) founded chaos theory by demonstrating that, in a heuristic climate model containing only five variables, and following rules that were predetermined and hence fully known, even a small perturbation in one of the variables could induce phase transitions in a later state of the climate that would not otherwise occur. It is the exiguity of the phase-transition trigger in the initial state of the climate, when compared with the magnitude of the subsequent effects of that small change, which mandates a level of detail and precision in our knowledge of the initial state of the climate that is not at present attainable.

Phase transitions — abrupt changes from an ordered to an apparently disordered state — occur in all chaotic objects, such as climate. We do not know enough to predict them. The models failed to predict the timing, duration or magnitude of the exceptional El Nino Southern Oscillation in 1998. They failed to predict the sudden and substantial cooling of the climate-relevant surface or mixed layer of the ocean over the past two years (Lyman et al., 2006). Such coolings seem to occur periodically, but we do not yet know why.

Unlike Lorenz’s heuristic, the Earth’s climate is not defined by us in advance. We do not make the rules, and we do not have a thorough understanding either of the rules themselves or of the consequences of their application. It is only recently that the AOGCMs have been developed to the point where “flux adjustments” many times larger than the comparatively small effects under study can be dispensed with. As Table 2 shows, it is at a rather early point in the algorithm that our level of scientific understanding of the processes we are using becomes low.

Furthermore, we have not been making detailed climatic measurements for long enough to establish the causes of events that now surprise us. Many of the climatic processes are being measured for the first time. We do not know how much hotter the Sun is in 2006 than it was in 1906. IPCC has substantially reduced its already-low estimate of the solar influence on climate since its 2001 report: but it still marks our understanding of the solar influence on climate as “low”. If the Sun has played a greater role in the past century’s warming than the IPCC considers likely, one possibility is that the contribution of greenhouse gases and other anthropogenic effects to the past century’s warming has been commensurately less even than that shown in Table 2.

Finally, the UN’s predictions are founded not only on an underestimate of the solar effect on climate that leaves pre-industrial climate change unexplained, but also on an excessive rate of increase in airborne carbon dioxide. The true rate is 0.38% year on year since records began in 1958. The rate has risen recently, but is still under 0.5%. The models assume 1% pa, more than two and a half times too high. In 2007 the UN will use these and other adjustments to predict a 21^st-century temperature increase of 2 to 6C. Stern suggests up to 11C.

The Economics

So to the economics. Stern’s report says the world must spend 1% of GDP from now on to avert disaster. The UN’s 2007 report was going to mention up to 5%, but Sir Nick’s team tell me, “We are confident that the UN will publish a range for costs next year in which ours will be centrally placed.” Some quiet, high-level co-ordination is going on. The oddest thing

about Stern’s curious report was its timing. Publication of the UN’s next major science assessment is only months ahead. Why not wait and base the economics on that?

The UN needed Stern more than Stern needed the UN. Its 2001 report had numbers more extreme than anyone else’s, so sceptics abounded. This time, an international spinfest is shutting off dissent in advance. First, the damage done by the defective graph had to be repaired, so a series of papers supporting its conclusions quickly appeared, many written by associates of its authors.

Next, the failure of observed temperature to rise as the UN projected had to be explained. Hence another flurry of learned papers, this time about the ocean notion — the maritime heat-sink into which the missing temperature might be vanishing.

Above all, it was vital that this time the UN’s report should not be seen to print the biggest exaggerations around. Enter Stern.

At whom was the spin aimed? At the Chinese, the Indians, the Indonesians and the Brazilians. China has 30,000 coal mines. It is opening a new power station every five days till 2012. The Third World is growing. It will not be told it cannot enjoy the growth we have enjoyed. It would not sign Kyoto till it was exempted, so, under Clinton and Gore, the US Senate voted unanimously to reject Kyoto. Whatever the West does to Save The Planet is mere gesture unless the developing world agrees to give up its right to grow as we have grown. It remains to be seen whether the US Senate, now under Democrat control, moves to ratify Kyoto.

Sir Nick says if we spend 1% of GDP now and forever we can reduce “the chances of temperature rises of 4–5C and above — at which levels some of the worst impacts occur”. The crucial number when evaluating tomorrow’s income-stream from today’s investments is the discount rate — the annual percentage by which any forecast of tomorrow’s revenue is cut to allow for the risks inherent in not getting it today. Stern discusses the rate at length, and even has a technical annex on it, but — astonishingly — not once in 700 pages does he put a figure on it.

I gave his team 24 hours’ notice of the question: What discount rate or rates and why? Six hours after my deadline, as the Treasury was closing, they said they might answer “next week”. The following morning, I rang and asked again. “There’s nobody in who worked on that part of the report,” they said. Eventually, and only after I had threatened to put down questions in the House of Lords, Stern’s team replied. Their answer is as follows:

“The annual discount rate can, under standard economic assumptions on diminishing marginal utility from consumption, be shown to approximate to the annual consumption growth rate multiplied by the elasticity of the marginal utility of consumption plus the pure rate of time preference. The elasticity is taken in the Review to be one, and the pure rate of time preference is assumed in the Review to be 0.1%. Therefore, for paths with different growth rates there are different discount rates.

“For GDP or consumption, we assume global average growth of 2% this century, 1.8% next century and 1.3% in 2200 and beyond, depending on time and region (so that, for instance, growth rates in developing countries are higher than those in developed countries).

“A scenario with higher GDP or consumption growth rates would be expected to generate greater emissions, but also have a reduced discount rate. The balance of these effects depends on how fast damages rise with emissions, and how the discounting factor changes rate over time (shaped by the growth rate and the elasticity of the marginal utility of consumption).”

Why the coyness? Because, despite the entire chapter devoted to the discount rate in the Stern Report, the procedure for setting the discount rate, and the rates themselves, are identical to those described on a single page in the Treasury’s Green Book. No commercial organization would use a discount rate so low: this rate is what the Treasury has been using to provide specious justification for the rapid, costly and wasteful expansion of the State sector under the present Government.

Stern’s team were also coy about what value our $500 billion a year would buy us. They said that if the world stabilized atmospheric CO₂ at around 485 parts per million we should have spent 1% of GDP to get a 1.1% fall in consumption. If we stabilized at 400ppm, consumption would fall by only 0.6%. But that is a pipedream: we are at 380ppm already, and, on Stern’s figures, we shall reach 400 in just eight years.

By 2035, says Sir Nick, temperature will have risen by “over 2C”. Sounds alarming. What he means, though, is over 2C since 1750, when we do not know what temperature was. Stern’s 485 parts per million by 2035 is based on the UN’s worst case. Even then, the increase compared with today would be just 0.7C. On the UN’s lower projection, implying 425ppm by 2035, only 0.3C.

The UK accounts for just 2% of global emissions, and falling. Even if Britain stopped using energy altogether, global temperature by 2035 would be six thousandths of a degree Celsius less than if we carried on as usual. If we shut down once a week on Planet Day, make that less than one thousandth. Even if every Western country complied with Kyoto (and most won’t), Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma, outgoing chairman of the Senate Environment Committee, says temperature a century from now would be a twenty-fifth of a degree lower than without Kyoto.

In that context, the few femtowatts you’ll save by turning off the standby LED on your TV don’t rate. It is not that energy efficiency, renewables and recycling will not make enough difference. They will hardly make any.

We are addressing the wrong problem. In the UK, energy is about to run out. In ten years, a third of our power stations will be worn out or against EU pollution laws. By 2035 oil prices could be ten times today’s. Our children would be immeasurably better off if we sequestered North Sea oil by leaving it in the ground than if we sequestered carbon dioxide at Peterhead.

While the Government quixotically tilts at wind-power the Danes, who did it first, have stopped building bird-slicers. You need a wind-farm the size of Greater Manchester to match the output of one nuclear power station, and not a watt if the wind isn’t blowing. As for hydro, if you want to build a plant above a megawatt in Scotland, you can’t, because for the last year two bureaucracies have been arguing about which of them should grant planning permission.

The UK needs to start building (not designing, or having ten-year planning enquiries about) 12 nuclear power stations at once. Nuclear power does not emit CO₂. The French, 80% nuclear, have half the UK’s carbon footprint. And what is Stern’s policy on nuclear power? “We argue that a portfolio of technologies will be needed.” The Government’s? “Er…” The Tories’? “Um, a last resort. Let’s all cycle to work and have the chauffeur follow us with our clean shirts.”

Sci-fi panics like climate change are dangerous because they distract politicians from what really needs doing. Y2K bug: correct solution, laugh; actual solution, Y2K Office; result, zilch at great cost. BSE/CJD: correct solution, eat British beef; actual solution, massive research and widespread hysteria; result, nada. Bird flu: correct solution, do nothing; actual solution, jobs for virologists and, weirdly, purchase of 200,000 body-bags; result, surplus of body-bags. Climate change: correct solution, go nuclear and reverse 20^th-century deforestation; actual solution, chauffeured shirts, rampant deforestation, EU paying farmers not to plant trees or anything else; result, energy crisis, species loss and no fall in CO₂.

Shouldn’t we take precautions, just in case? No. The “precautionary principle” kills. Example — DDT: correct solution, limit it in agriculture but allow indoor spraying against malaria; actual solution, give the inventor a Nobel Prize, then say it’s cancerous (it’s safe enough to eat) and ban it, especially for indoor spraying; result, only this year, after 30 million dead of malaria and counting, has the WHO agreed to recommend indoor spraying.

Carbon taxes? Bizarrely, the UK’s climate-change levy taxes all forms of generation even if they don’t emit CO₂. David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, told the BBC this week how good it was. The BBC didn’t argue.

Emissions trading? The EU’s daft scheme allows more emissions to be traded than are being emitted — except in the UK, whose business-unaware Government sets us at a disadvantage by imposing a lower limit and not even exempting the NHS. Result: poor hospitals have to buy emission rights from rich oil companies. Miliband told the BBC how good it was. The BBC didn’t argue. One of the better jokes going the rounds at Westminster is that the unit of cant is the Miliband.

Emissions trading and all such interventions advocated by the climate-change “consensus” will be expensively futile without the consent of the Third World’s fast-growing nations. That consent will rightly be withheld until the UN produces soundly-based, scientifically-honest, fair and realistic projections. Meanwhile, cut out and keep this article. If Margaret Beckett has her way, you won’t ever see one like it again.

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