Neil Reynolds, Toronto Globe and Mail columnist, former global warming denier and now, it seems, a mitigation skeptic, wrote on Friday:
Without heroic government intervention, [economist Richard Tol] says, climate change will probably cause damage equal to losing two years of economic growth [a few percent of income according to the abstract of Tol's paper] - co-incidentally the same damage caused by an average recession.
Neglecting the fact that Tol's paper, published by Bjorn Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus Centre, omits the Stern Review from its Table 1. list of studies on the 'estimates of welfare loss due to climate change', and underestimates damage from climate change...
If there were a flood and 50 million people in Bangladesh perished, world 'wealth' would decrease less than 1 percent - they would mostly be poor people. Lomborg and Tol would then claim that we could make that up with a year or two of economic growth?!
I wish I were Jon Stewart so I could sit there in stunned silence, as only he can, and then say, "Yeah... flood... 50 million poor people die, then after a year or two of global economic growth we'd be all square again ... WTF".
