Which means? Grammar, please, not spelling!
Cheers,

Anybody who can’t get singular and plural to agree as here is as evident throughout this blog unable to get his algebra right.

My previous comment had a typo – the total value estimated by Nordhaus was $500 billion, not million. Also, I didn’t intend to imply that Nordhaus was influenced by US skeptics, just that the presence of lots of skeptics would drag down the average WTP in any survey. So, I’d expect to see rising WTP once the impacts are clear and generally accepted.

In my view the shortcomings of the WTP metric are wholly exposed wrt to climate change policy and I look forward to post on the subject. For starters WTP is predicated the assumption of full information, which thanks to the FUDs isn’t very likely…

Nordhaus’ numbers were published in the Economic Journal and in the American Economic Review, and they build on research published in many other peer-reviewed journals. Although weak, it is a bit of stretch to claim that these numbers were “plucked out of the air”. In criticizing his $500 mln number, you are confusing marginals with totals. To suggest that Nordhaus is influenced by the fact that there are more skeptics in the US than in Europe is just nonsense.

Is it not time that you stop complaining about other people’s research and start doing original work yourself — and publish it in a journal rather than on the web?

To clarify my point, I don’t think the costs of species extinction have been properly taken into account in the literature so far, including the work of the authors listed by Richard Tol, at least as far as I’ve read it.

As regards US attitudes, it’s worth remembering that the bogus debate over the reality of global warming is still alive there, unlike in Europe – this creates a problem in relying on US estimates.

There are about 10 published studies on the willingness to pay for climate impacts (Nordhaus, Cline, Fankhauser, Tol, Maddison, Rehdanz). Stern is about an order of magnitude off.

There are about 5 published studies on the willingness to pay for climate policy. Stern is about 2 orders of magnitude off, apart from this one study that was limited to students at Harvard — Stern and Harvard students agree, but Harvard students strongly disagree with the average American. The average American, by the way, also strongly disagrees with the US administration.