Lord Stern, 'Scaremonger in chief', exposed by simple blunders - Telegraph

Unsurprisingly, there is no one for whom Lord Stern has more contempt than those he calls the "deniers" of man-made global warming. He told The Daily Telegraph last week that they "look more and more like those who denied the association between HIV and Aids, or smoking and cancer". In his book, he criticises the media for giving any space at all to such people, when "the balance of logic and evidence is 99 per cent or more to one".

But for a man whose whole case rests on the damage supposedly being done to the planet by carbon dioxide, it was somewhat disconcerting to see him quoted as saying that CO2 levels [but maybe he's talking CO2-equivalent?] in the atmosphere have now reached "430 parts per million [ppm]". He said exactly the same last year in an interview with Prospect. The actual level is 388.97 ppm. It may seem a tiny point, but one might have expected "the world's leading expert on climate change" to have a rather surer grasp of a fact so central to his case.

Similarly, one would not expect a man whose institute is claimed to be "a world-leader in low carbon technologies" to claim, as he does in his book, that by next year wind energy "is set to account for 8 per cent of electricity generation in the UK", when the current figure is scarcely 1 per cent; or that "wind accounted for 35 per cent of total installed power capacity in the US in 2007", when two minutes on the internet could have shown him that wind power that year generated less electricity in the US than a single large coal-fired power station.