But despite an impressive scholarly apparatus that goes on for 700 pages, Stern's report is hack work. A number of the world's leading resource economists quickly found insurmountable problems with its assumptions and analysis. About the best that was said for it was that some of its conclusions might still be defended on other grounds. Stern, however, dismissed his critics without answering their criticisms by calling them morally obtuse.  

Brown's government ignored these devastating criticisms and relied on the Review as the intellectual justification for its policies to restrict fossil fuel use and to subsidise more expensive alternatives, such as wind turbines. Other countries accepted it as well; Australia even produced a copy, the Garnaut Report; and the Cameron government fell into line (although the recent elavation of Owen Paterson suggests that reality is dawning).

To counter the persistence of the Review's influence, Peter Lilley MP has now debunked it in What is Wrong with Stern? published in September by Lord Lawson's Global Warming Policy Foundation. Lilley gives an especially clear explanation of the multiple faulty assumptions and false reasoning that support the central claim that the benefits of stopping warming will outweigh the costs of doing so by a factor of five. 

To summarise, Stern requires people in the next half century or so to pay the colossal costs of reducing emissions, while most of the alleged benefits of doing so won't be enjoyed for a century or two. Since Stern accepts the standard economic growth assumption that people in the future will have a much higher living standard (even though temperatures will be higher) than people today, this means that wealth will be redistributed from us to much wealthier people a century from now. And we're supposed to like it.