Nordhaus v. Nordhaus v. Nordhaus

The fourth contention by the sixteen scientists is that skeptical climate scientists are living under a reign of terror about their professional and personal livelihoods.

They write:

“Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global­ warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse….

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before— for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. …”

The idea that skeptical climate scientists are being treated like Soviet geneticists in the Stalinist period has no basis in fact. There are no political or scientific dictators in the US. No climate scientist has been expelled from the US National Academy of Sciences. No skeptics have been arrested or banished to gulags or the modern equivalents of Siberia. Indeed, the dissenting authors are at the world’s greatest universities, including Princeton, MIT, Rockefeller, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Paris.

I can speak personally for the lively debate about climate change policy. There are controversies about many details of climate science and economics. While some claim that skeptics cannot get their papers published, working papers and the Internet are open to all. I believe the opposite of what the sixteen claim to be true: dissident voices and new theories are encouraged because they are critical to sharpening our analysis. The idea that climate science and economics are being suppressed by a modern Lysenkoism is pure fiction. (William Nordhaus, “Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong,” 2012)

From another Nordhaus:¹

The second reason is that there are strong social, political, and professional incentives if you make a living doing left of center climate and energy policy to get climate risk wrong. The capture of Democratic and progressive politics by environmentalism over the last generation has been close to total. There is little tolerance on the Left for any expression of materialist politics that challenge foundational claims of the environmental movement. Meanwhile the climate movement has effectively conflated consensus science about the reality and anthropogenic origins of climate change with catastrophist claims about climate risk for which there is no consensus whatsoever.

Whether you are an academic researcher, a think tank policy wonk, a program officer at an environmental or liberal philanthropy, or a Democratic Congressional staffer, there is simply no benefit and plenty of downside to questioning, much less challenging, the central notion that climate change is an existential threat to the human future. It’s a good way to lose friends or even your job. It won’t help you get your next job or your next grant. And so everyone, mostly falls in line. Better to go along to get along. (Ted Nordhaus, “Why I Stopped Being a Climate Catastrophist,” Aug 11, 2025)

Revealed Preference

The title of the WSJ article William Nordhaus was criticizing in the first quote was "No Need to Panic About Global Warming: There's no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to 'decarbonize' the world's economy." The claim of those on the other side is the opposite, that global warming poses a severe threat to human welfare and drastic action is needed to slow it. Which side of that argument does Nordhaus' own research support?

My research shows that there are indeed substantial net benefits from acting now rather than waiting fifty years. A look at Table 5-1 in my study A Question of Balance (2008) shows that the cost of waiting fifty years to begin reducing CO2 emissions is $2.3 trillion in 2005 prices. If we bring that number to today’s economy and prices, the loss from waiting is $4.1 trillion. Wars have been started over smaller sums. (William Nordhaus, op. cit.)²

$4.1 trillion is a lot of money but it is the sum of costs spread over the entire globe and an extended period of time. The article does not specify how long a period Nordhaus is summing over but in his book A Question of Balance he appears to be summing over the next 250 years, making the annual cost $16 billion. World GDP in 2012 was about $76 trillion/year so, according to Nordhaus's estimate, the annual cost of waiting fifty years to do anything about climate change is about .02% of world GDP.³

Which position is that closer to, that there is a need to panic and take drastic action or that there is not?

And yet, when Nordhaus publishes an article on the issue in a high-profile publication, it is an attack not on those who, according to his own research, vastly exaggerate the scale of the problem and the need for immediate drastic action but on their critics.

Neither William Nordhaus nor the authors of the WSJ article offered evidence for their view of the incentives facing researchers in the climate field but although Nordhaus’s article offers no evidence for its claim it is itself evidence against it. A central idea of economics is revealed preference; we judge people by what they do, not what they say.

“Better to go along to get along.”

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1. Ted Nordhaus is the nephew of William Nordhaus.

2. I first discussed the article in two posts on my blog, “Contra Nordhaus,” 3/15/2014 and Acts Vs Words: The Case of Nordhaus, 3/18/2014

3. His total is a present value. I assume for simplicity that world GDP grows at the interest rate he uses for discounting, making the present value of a given fraction of GNP the same for every future year. If GDP grows more slowly than that, the fraction of annual GDP needed to give a present value a given amount grows over time at the difference between the two rates.