Bob Ward and the Grantham Institute are jumping up and down this morning about a new paper the Institute has published. It's fair to say the conclusions of author Fergus Green, as reported in the Grantham Institute press release are striking:

Countries will benefit economically from almost all of the actions needed to limit global warming to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels, according to a paper published today (PDF) (13 July 2015) by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy at London School of Economics and Political Science.

The paper suggests that individual countries have large incentives to make ambitious reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and to agree to strong collective action at the United Nations climate change conference in Paris in December.

Remarkable stuff, I'm sure you will agree, overturning much of what we thought we knew about the economics of global warming mitigation. It's even more surprising when you learn that Mr Green is not an economist at all, but a post-graduate student who was until recently a lawyer at a firm in Australia.

But even that is as nothing when set against the revelation that he has reached these conclusions without actually crunching any numbers! Here's an extract from the abstract:

This paper [develops] a unified conceptual framework for advancing and evaluating claims about the extent of mitigation action that could be done in states’ self-interest, defined (for the sake of facilitating debate) in terms of economic efficiency. The paper concludes that there is a strong prima facie case that the majority of the emissions reductions needed to decarbonise the global economy can be achieved in ways that are nationally net-beneficial to countries, even leaving aside the climate benefits. Accordingly, the default assumption in social science scholarship should be that actions to reduce emissions are nationally net-beneficial. The barriers to mitigation action lie, primarily, not in the macro-incentive structures of states (i.e. climate action is, mostly, not a tragedy of the commons / prisoner’s dilemma) but rather within the domestic sphere, at the intersection of domestic interests, institutions and ideas formed in the fossil fuel age.

Yes folks, what Mr Green has done is to develop a conceptual framework, with which he overturns decades of scholarship. On examining the paper, he seems to have split the alleged benefits of mitigation actions into direct benefits and a series of indirect and co-benefits, which he discusses considerable length, describing examples of each in qualitative terms. Then he considers the costs of mitigation actions in similar qualitative fashion, but brushing them aside in a page's worth of poo-poohing. Finally, he concludes:

The potential for nationally net-beneficial mitigation action across the individual categories...looks, from the theory and partial evidence adduced there, very large indeed. But even this category-by-category, summative approach belies the true scale of the potential for net-beneficial mitigation action that comes from considering the categories of actions together — particularly when the static co-benefits of individual actions are considered alongside the dynamic and systemic potential for reductions in direct costs associated with those actions, and alongside the potential benefits from even modest levels of coordination among a few key states...

All things considered, I conclude that there is a very strong prima facie case that most of the mitigation action needed to stay within the internationally-agreed 2°C limit is likely to be nationally net-beneficial.

Since there is a strong prima facie case that most of the global mitigation task is likely to be nationally net beneficial, this should become the default assumption concerning the nationally-specific net present value of mitigation actions; those who claim otherwise should bear the burden of proving otherwise.

This apparently is what passes for scholarship at the London School of Economics and we can all have a good laugh about it. It wouldn't be the first time an academic paper has failed to rise above primary school level. But now consider this excerpt from the press release:

The paper states: “All things considered, I conclude that there is a very strong case that most of the mitigation action needed to stay within the internationally-agreed 2°C limit is likely to be nationally net-beneficial."

This of course is not true because, as we have seen, the paper actually says that there is a strong "prima facie" case, and while this is not actually true either (or at least the paper doesn't make a serious attempt to demonstrate it), the important thing is that "a strong prima facie case" is a very different beast to "a strong case".

But hey, let's be charitable. Perhaps it was an accident. Maybe it got lost in translation. So let's consider the next quote from the press release:

The paper states that “the majority of the global emissions reductions needed to decarbonise the global economy can be achieved in ways that are nationally net-beneficial to countries, even leaving aside the ‘climate benefits’.”

...and here's the relevant excerpt from the paper:

It is on the basis of this theory and partial evidence that the paper concludes that there is at least a prima facie case that the majority of the global climate mitigation task — decarbonising the global economy within the present century — can be done through actions that are nationally net-beneficial for states.

"At least a prima facie case" based on "theory and partial evidence" eh? Different again.

So as you can see, the Grantham Institute is doctoring quotes from its own papers so as to hype the findings. What a surprise. What sort of a charlatan do they have in charge?