Tomorrow British academic Nicholas Stern will testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on “Climate Change: Costs of Inaction.” Stern is the author of the highly alarmist Stern Review that urged Britain to sharply curtail their carbon emissions today to avoid possible damage to their economy in the future. When the British government failed to adopt his policy recommendations, Stern left the British government and he is now free to peddle his global warming horror show world wide.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Chris Horner has some must read posts in anticipation of Stern’s testimony tomorrow over at NRO’s Planet Gore. We particularly like CEI’s collection of quotes from economists refuting Stern’s conclusions from the last time he testified before the House, including:

[Stern] makes numerous new assumptions that cause the estimated damages from climate change to be far more severe than previous estimates. The report also makes several strong assumptions that lower the estimated abatement costs. Finally, the report does not consider any policy alternatives other than its own abatement strategy and doing nothing, thus ignoring the possibility of an optimal abatement path that is apart from its own proposal. These characteristics raise serious questions about the soundness of the report’s policy recommendation. … [T]he analysis needs to be based on solid science and economics before hundreds of billions of dollars per year are invested in abatement.

?Dr. Robert O. Mendelsohn, School of Forestry and Environmental Science, Yale University

Despite using many good references, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change is selective and its conclusion flawed. Its fear-mongering arguments have been sensationalized, which is ultimately only likely to make the world worse off.

?Dr. Bjørn Lomborg, Director, Copenhagen Consensus Center and Adjunct Professor, Copenhagen Business School

The report claims that a cost-benefit analysis was done, but none was carried out. The Stern Review can therefore be dismissed as alarmist and incompetent. … If a student of mine were to hand in this report as a masters thesis, perhaps if I were in a good mood I would give him a D for diligence; but more likely I would give him an F for fail.

?Dr. Richard Tol, Michael Otto Professor of Sustainability and Global Change, Hamburg University