Climate Science, Economics, and Policy

I am an economist, and a relative newcomer to climate change issues. I became involved with the subject by accident rather than design. To begin with, my main involvement was limited to some economic and statistical aspects of this huge and complex array of topics. Over time, however, my interests and concerns have broadened in ways that I had neither planned nor expected. Increasingly, I have become critical of the way in which the issues of climate change are being viewed and treated by governments across the world, with widespread support from public opinion. I am now a non-subscriber to positions, arguments, and policies that find general and often unquestioning support. Today I will outline the minority views—you might well think, the heretical views—that I have come to hold, and my reasons for holding them.received opinion shared by the great majority of governments and by many of their citizens. Predictably, however, it is not universally shared. Both diagnosis and prescription remain subject to challenge by a varied collection of doubters, skeptics, questioners, critics, non-subscribers, nonconformists—in a word, dissenters. Against them, and greatly outnumbering them, are arrayed what I term the upholders of received opinion.

Those views now extend to the subject as a whole, not just the economic aspects. In fact, I shall say little about economics as such. Rather, I shall focus more on what economists and others have said or assumed about climate science, where I am out of step with majority thinking.

In relation to climate change issues, there exists a widely shared diagnosis and prescription, a body of