Lord Stern makes some errors....

The Stern Report is beloved by Global warmers....but Christopher Booker highlights some huge errors he has made in his new book....

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 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.

In fact, when the Stern Review came out in 2006, predicting that global warming could soon account for the extinction of 40 per cent of all species of life on earth, far from being universally lauded it was savagely criticised by some of the very people who might have been expected to praise it – his fellow economists. No one was more excoriatory than the man on whose work Lord Stern claimed to have based many of his most scarifying predictions, the noted Dutch economist Dr Richard Tol.

Far from being a global-warming sceptic, Dr Tol has played a key part in the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and wrote the UN Handbook on Methods for Climate Change Impact Assessment. But he could not have been more withering about the way the Stern Review went out of its way to cherry pick the most alarming possible predictions about the impacts of climate change and then to exaggerate them still further. Where Tol had, for instance, given a range of costs up to $14 per ton of CO2, while saying that the actual cost was "likely to be substantially smaller", Stern had more than doubled his figure, to $29 a ton. Stern's report, Tol pronounced, could be "dismissed as alarmist and incompetent", and his doomsday prophecies were simply "preposterous".

Yet this is the man, reverentially treated by the BBC, the media and politicians everywhere as "the world's leading expert on climate change" – so lost in his apocalyptic dreams that he doesn't even know something so basic to his cause as how much CO2 there is in the air we breathe.