Richard Tol is a Dutch economist who through the ‘00s and much of the 20-teens has argued that warming could be good for the global economy. Tol’s reputation took a big hit in 2013 when Bob Ward of the London School of Economics pointed out that Tol had made fundamental errors, counting four different studies that showed a significant cost from climate as instead benefiting the economy. After Ward continued to identify problems with Tol’s work, Tol eventually admitted the error in the form of a correction to the study. But instead of taking responsibility for his egregious error, he blamed “gremlins” who “intervened” in the preparation of his paper. Literally.
Weirdly, this incident didn’t dampen his credibility among deniers, who in 2015 were happy to cite his (not-peer-reviewed working paper) research showing that if warming could be beneficial if kept to 1C.
Since the gremlin incident, Tol has stuck mostly to attacking consensus research but otherwise not giving much denier-friendly research on environmental economics. But now Tol’s 2015 working paper, a literature review of economic impacts of climate change, has finally been published in the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy. Odds are we’ll see some deniers champion it.
Aside from the need to scour for gremlin-related “mistakes,” it’s unclear why it took over two years for the paper to move through the peer review process. We’d think reviewers were being careful to find every possible gremlin-induced error. (Even that sounds unlikely, since it looks like someone on Twitter has already spotted a problem.)
Regardless, we can expect another round of stories based on Tol’s research claiming it’s cheaper to adapt to climate change than to fight it. As always, these stories will be wrong.
The abstract to Tol’s paper states plainly that an “optimal carbon tax in the near term is somewhere between a few tens and a few hundreds of dollars per ton of carbon.” This clarity is reason enough for some deniers to turn on Tol, while others look at the outlier positive impact at 1C as cause to jump to the conclusion that Paris and other climate policies “do more harm than good.” (Note that this quote was tweeted by the Daily Caller’s Michael Bastasch, so odds are he’ll turn that half-baked thought into a half-baked story…)
But for the more-harm-than-good line to be true, we’d need to actually limit warming to 1C. Given that we’ve already warmed by about 1C, this scenario would require policies far more stringent than anything being realistically discussed now. To prevent any further warming, we’d have to not only immediately stop burning all fossil fuels and stop deforestation, but also find a way to start absorbing the CO2 that we’ve already emitted that’s going to keep warming us for years to come.
One more little thing in the way: Tol’s 2002 study, the sole paper finding benefits to warming, apparently “made heroic assumptions about increases in plant growth” and didn’t count a bunch of climate impacts. Betting the planet on a single paper by a guy with a gremlin problem seems risky, to say the least.
But even taking Tol at face value, deniers are crazy to think the study supports an argument against climate action. After all, the study shows that we’re in for huge costs, unless we somehow find a (politically feasible) way to not only end current emissions immediately, but also remove the CO2 released over the past 200 years.
Maybe Tol’s gremlins can help?
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