Just watch this Youtube flick, it's 9 minutes well spent. It'll explain to you that it's 50 times more expensive to try to stop climate change, than it is to adapt to it.

Next ponder why you pay so much on (climate) taxes. ;-)

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Jord.

Their simplistic formula implies they know exactly what climate change will cost. What if impacts on food prodcution are much worse (e.g. tropical pests and fungi that establish themselves midlatitude, collapses in marine ecosystems)? I'm guessing the 50-to-1 project doesn't price in the mortality required to adapt to a world with 10% fewer calories.

I've read the PDF of the argument supporting the video.

Its logic is flawed. To take one example of flawed reasoning, it treats the Australian carbon 'tax' as a complete loss, as though the Australian government were to take $10 billion out of the economy every year and put the banknotes through the shredder.

In reality, the tax money returns to the economy through transfers to citizens and companies, and government spending on healthcare, infrastructure, and so on.

So the real cost is much, much less. Using the paper's own arithmetic, the costs of mitigation and of adaptation are about the same size, not 50 to 1.

Another, more subtle, flaw in the paper lies in the things that it does not talk about. Part of the argument for keeping temperature rise below 2�C is an insurance one. Nearly every house owner buys fire insurance, even though the likelihood of a house burning down, taken over its whole life, is less than 3%, and in most cases much less than this. People still buy fire insurance, even though in nearly all the time it is just a tax that takes their money away, never to return.

Temperature rise of over 2� is thought to greatly increase the risk of seriously bad things happening. How much are we prepared to spend on an insurance premium to prevent a permanent 80% loss of global GDP, and its attendant misery and deaths?

Actually, scratch that question. Knowingly taking a significant risk of causing that much harm is just morally wrong.

I'm not saying that carbon taxes are the only or the best way of reducing our GHG output, but this video is astounding in many of its premises and the collection of sceptics the 50:1 project pulls together. They even manage to quote the Stern Report in such a way as to argue the opposite of what Stern intended.

Marc Morano appears to be an ex-employee of Jim Imhofe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Morano

Joannenova is author of The Skeptics' Handbook:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joanne_Nova

Her estimate of climate sensitivity looks to me highly improbable.

David Evans, the so-called rocket scientist:

http://denierlist.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/dr-david-evans/

Professor Christopher Essex of the Uni of Western Ontario. They love him at the Heartland Institute:

http://heartland.org/christopher-essex

Fred Singer:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/skeptic_Fred_Singer.htm

Donna Laframboise maintains that there's no scientific consensus about global warming:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Laframboise

To end up, Anthony Watts himself. He thinks climate change and warming may be a good thing for us:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/author/wattsupwiththat/

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