Der Umgang mit Zukunftswissen in der Klimapolitikberatung. Eine Fallstudie zum Stern Review

Abstract

The Stern Review on The Economics of Climate Change is a highly influential welfare analysis of climate policy measures which has been published in 2006. This paper identifies and systematically assesses the long-term socio-economic and climatic predictions the Stern Review relies on, and reflects them philosophically. Being a cost-benefit analysis, the Stern Review has to predict the benefits of climate mitigation policies, i.e. the damaging consequences of climate change which might be avoided, as well as the costs of implementing such policies. While distinguishing deterministic, probabilistic, and possibilisitic forecasts, this paper finds that the Review's major predictions severly suffer from a lack of robustness. It argues, moreover, that the use of subjective probabilities as well as the fact/value entanglement pose additional problems. Given our ignorance, this assessment raises finally the question how detailed an analysis of climate policy decisions should reasonably be at all, and whether the argument for acting against climate change is maybe very simple.