IPCC's layers and layers of fact-checking failed again: Did we write 18,000 trillion dollars? Sorry, we meant just 18 trillion dollars

UN panel once exaggerated costs of climate fight — by 1,000 times | Analysis & Opinion |

In 2003, I was at a conference in Moscow at which Bert Bolin of Sweden, the first chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was trying to persuade a largely sceptical audience of Russian experts that the fight against global warming was affordable.

His problem: a key part of the IPCC evidence he presented exaggerated the costs to the world economy by a mind-boggling 1,000 times.

The cost “has negligible impacts on the projected economic growth”, he assured the audience, under a giant slide showing that the costs, in the worst case, would be almost $18,000,000,000,000,000 this century. (… it was wrong — such an amount would cripple the world economy).

Bolin was a persuasive debater, with wit and deep knowledge, but you could feel from the muttering around the audience that he wasn’t winning that one. He (wrongly) acknowledged that the costs could run to the ”quadrillions” of dollars, and produced other data (rightly) showing that the estimated costs — mostly of shifting from fossil fuels towards renewable energies — could easily be absorbed by an expanding world economy.
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A while after the Moscow conference, the IPCC quietly fixed the graph in the 2001 assessment as an “important correction”, cutting three zeroes. It now shows that it could cost up to $18,000,000,000,000 - that is still a huge amount but only a few percentage points of world GDP by 2050.