Alan Carlin: EPA's klokkenluider

On Friday my new paper on climate change science and economics was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, a peer-reviewed journal. The paper is unusual from a number of different perspectives. From a policy perspective, the paper’s conclusions include the following: ·

The economic benefits of reducing CO2 emissions may be about two orders of magnitude less than those estimated by most economists because the climate sensitivity factor is much lower than assumed by the United Nations because feedback is negative rather than positive and the effects of CO2 emissions reductions on atmospheric CO2 appear to be short rather than long lasting.

The costs of CO2 emissions reductions are perhaps an order of magnitude higher than usually estimated because of technological and implementation problems recently identified.

CO2 emissions reductions are economically unattractive since the few benefits remaining after the corrections for the above effects are quite unlikely to economically justify the much higher costs unless much lower cost geoengineering is used. 

The risk of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming appears to be so low that it is not currently worth doing anything to try to control it, including geoengineering. .

Although this article was not written for EPA, it has major implications for the scientific validity (or lack thereof) of the December 2009 EPA Endangerment Finding and the economics that EPA and many economists have used to justify current efforts to regulate the emission of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, cap-and-trade schemes, and other approaches to controlling climate change.