Wanted: Criticism
As I have mentioned here before, I have been working on a critique of a recent Nature article that finds a very high value for the social cost of carbon, the net cost from now to 2300 produced by an additional ton of CO2. I argue that the article greatly exaggerates the cost by errors which should be obvious to a careful reader, one of them being the implicit assumption that there will be no improvement in most of the technologies relevant to the costs, including medicine, for the next three centuries.
The implication of my critique, if it is correct, is that the enterprise of producing estimates of the costs of climate change is broken. The important point is not that this particular article makes mistakes but that it makes obvious mistakes, should never have gotten through peer review in its present form. If an article with obvious mistakes, all of which increase its estimate of the cost of carbon, can get published in a high status scientific journal and be considered by the EPA as a possible basis for regulatory decisions, it follows that the mechanisms that are supposed to filter out bad scientific work are not working in this context, hence that none of the published estimates can be trusted.
That is a strong claim and it might be wrong, but if it is right should be a serious problem for people who accept the current orthodoxy with regard to climate. I am therefor inviting anyone interested, especially anyone inclined to accept current views on the effects of climate change, to look over my critique and tell me what is wrong with it.
Hostile reviewers are more useful, for my purposes, than friendly reviewers.