SPOILER! Kattints ide a szöveg elolvasásához!The original paper suggested that there were net beneficial impacts up to about 2.2 centigrade degrees of warming, and has been widely cited by climate change ‘sceptics’, including Viscount Ridley who used it as the basis of an article in The Spectator in October 2013 which claimed that “climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century”.
However, after I raised concerns with Professor Tol and with the journal about a number of errors in the article, a correction was quietly posted on the journal’s website last week. The correction points out that the original paper concluded that “there were net benefits of climate change associated with warming below about 2°C”, but the updated analysis shows “impacts are always negative”.
This is significant because a more recent paper by Professor Tol, which was published by the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control in 2013 but contained many of the same errors as the 2009 paper, was used as the basis for a section on the economic damage caused by climate change in the report of the IPCC on ‘Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability’.