The latest wheeze of climate hysterics is the Stern Review.

Climate change could cut global growth by a fifth, costing up to £3.68 trillion in total, unless drastic action is taken, a review is to warn.

But taking action now would cost just 1% of global gross domestic product, economist Sir Nicholas Stern says.

Without action up to 200 million people could become refugees as their homes are hit by drought or flood, he adds.

Chancellor Gordon Brown is to promise the UK will lead the international response to tackle climate change.

Mr Brown is to say of the government-commissioned report: "The truth is, we must tackle climate change internationally, or we will not tackle it at all."

The Stern Review, which is published on Monday, will say the key to solving the crisis is getting the big polluting countries, such as the US and China, to cut their emissions.

Sir Nicholas will say the polluters must be made to "pay the price" for the problems they are causing the planet. . .

And Mr Brown has recruited former US vice president Al Gore as an environment adviser.

The figures will be disputed. I expect that when the review is critically analyzed a number of unreasonable assumptions will be found, or claimed at least, and any number of errors and fudges will be claimed.

This is important to do, but it may be useful to step back a bit and examine the political content of the enterprise since it is chiefly that - political. Each bit of data is speculative, so the error multiplies. It's a SWAG that can be used as a wedge to push a political program. Citizens are, and will remain, rationally ignorant of the issues and so can be manipulated to some extent. It's a politician's dream scenario.

It's illuminating to look at the record of politicians so far.

Money pledged by the UK to help an African township cut energy costs is paying for bureaucrats and accountants. . .

Ministers announced that last year's G8 meeting would be the first ever carbon neutral summit and pledged that £50,000 would be given to a scheme in a township in Cape Town which provided energy saving light bulbs and fuel efficient stoves to local residents.

The money is being routed through the United Nations-run Clean Development Mechanism, which gives the stamp of approval to energy saving schemes.

However, the BBC has learned that the whole scheme has turned into a bureaucratic nightmare for the local council who face being left in debt.

Council spokeswoman Shirene Rosenberg said the British money would have to be spent on auditors hired from an international accountancy firm who would check on the efficiency of the scheme.

Other sources have said that one of the jobs of the auditors may be to count the light bulbs to check how many have been broken.

"It's been a complicated and onerous process," said Ms Rosenberg. "It would definitely make the council think twice about being involved in another project like this."

It's a jobs program for bureaucrats and blue hats - the Toyota Taliban. But we knew that from the start, and must consider what the claims and commitments of politicians really mean when considering their newest schemes. They don't deliver the goods, they just grease their crew.

If you are concerned about the environment, especially the climate, these are the bad guys. They seek to enrich themselves and grow their industry using climate scares to bilk the public. When the dust settles a lot will have been spent and nothing will have been accomplished. If the threat of climate change has been exaggerated this will just be another instance of government waste and fraud - though larger than ever. But if the threat is real, or even worse than suspected, this will be a tragedy. Either way, these folks cannot be trusted with the task.

Update:

So it begins. Stern’s Cherry Picking on Disasters and Climate Change

The Stern Report has this passage on p. 131:

The costs of extreme weather events are already high and rising, with annual losses of around $60 billion since the 1990s (0.2% of World GDP), and record costs of $200 billion in 2005 (more than 0.5% of World GDP). New analysis based on insurance industry data has shown that weather-related catastrophe losses have increased by 2% each year since the 1970s over and above changes in wealth, inflation and population growth/movement. If this trend continued or intensified with rising global temperatures, losses from extreme weather could reach 0.5 - 1% of world GDP by the middle of the century. If temperatures continued to rise over the second half of the century, costs could reach several percent of GDP each year, particularly because the damages increase disproportionately at higher temperatures.

The source is a paper prepared by Robert Muir-Wood and colleagues as input to our workshop last May on disasters and climate change. Muir-Wood et al. do report the 2% trend since 1970. What Stern Report does not say is that Muir-Wood et al. find no trend 1950-2005 and Muir-Wood et al. acknowledge that their work shows a very strong influence of 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons in the United States. Muir-Wood et al. are therefore very cautious and responsible about their analysis. Presumably this is one reason why at the workshop Robert Muir-Wood signed on to our consensus statements, which said the following:

Because of issues related to data quality, the stochastic nature of extreme event impacts, length of time series, and various societal factors present in the disaster loss record, it is still not possible to determine the portion of the increase in damages that might be attributed to climate change due to GHG emissions . . . In the near future the quantitative link (attribution) of trends in storm and flood losses to climate changes related to GHG emissions is unlikely to be answered unequivocally.

The Stern Report’s selective fishing out of a convenient statement from one of the background papers prepared for our workshop is a classic example of cherry picking a result from a diversity of perspectives, rather than focusing on the consensus of the entire spectrum of experts that participated in our meeting. The Stern Report even cherry picks from within the Muir-Wood et al. paper. Why does this matter? The Stern Report uses the cherry-picked information as the basis for one of its important conclusions about the projected costs of climate change(on p. 138)

This is a political document. I wonder how long this sort of thing will continue? It seems terribly irresponsible to use such an important threat in this way.