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|b Climate change threatens the basic elements of life for people around the world - access to water, food production, health, and use of land and the environment. As developing nations industrialize their energy needs increase and since conventional energy sources produce carbon dioxide, the carbon dioxide emissions of developing countries are beginning to rise at a time when the scientific community, global governance institutions and advocacy groups are telling the world that carbon dioxide emissions should be decreasing. Without access to cost effective and abundant energy sources many developing countries see climate change as a hindrance to their unfettered economic development; Analysts have assessed global warming in relation to sustainable development which considers how future generations might be affected by the actions of the current generation. The public good is viewed in a similar way as a private good, where those who use the public good must pay for it. Some people will benefit more from the public good than others, thus creating inequalities in the absence of benefit taxes One of the economic aspects of climate change is producing scenarios of future economic developments which can, for example, affect how vulnerable society is to future climate change, what the future impacts of climate change might be, as well as the level of future GHG emissions. IPCC assigned probabilities that particular SRES scenarios project a wide range of possible futures. Some are pessimistic for example, 5 scenarios project the future breakdown of human society, Others are optimistic, future advances in technology solve most or all of humanity problems. Most scenarios projecting rising GHGs also project low levels of government intervention in the economy. Scenarios projecting falling GHGs generally have high levels of government intervention in the economy. The social discount rate is used by governments to compare the economic effects of different policy decisions over time. The long-term nature of climate change makes the choice of social discount rate important in economic cost assessments of climate change policies. Using a high discount rate decreases the assessed benefit of actions designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In a cost-benefit analysis, the tradeoffs between climate change impacts, adaptation, and mitigation are made explicit. Cost-benefit analyses of climate change are produced using integrated assessment models (IAMs), which incorporate aspects of the natural, social, and economic sciences. Stern Review states that climate change is the greatest and widest- ranging market failure ever seen, presenting a unique challenge for economics. The Review provides prescriptions including environmental taxes to minimize the economic and social disruption. How much and how fast should the globe reduce greenhouse- gas emissions? How should nations balance the costs of the reductions against the damages and dangers of climate change? The Stem Review answers these questions clearly and unambiguously: we need urgent, sharp, and immediate reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. According to the Review, without action, the overall costs of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least 5 % of global gross domestic product (GDP) each year, now and forever. Including a wider range of risks and impacts could increase this to 20 % of GDP or more. The Review proposes 1% of global GDP per annum is required to be invested in order to avoid the worst effects of climate change. The Stern Review's discount rate for climate change damages is approximately 1.4%, which, at the time of the Review, was lower than that used in most previous economic studies on climate change. Estimating discounting rates and the consequent social cost of carbon, the assumptions that must be made about the remote future are so uncertain that they are essentially arbitrary. Consequently the assumptions made dominate the results and with a low discount rate the social cost of carbon is also arbitrary. It depends decisively on the assumption of a near-zero social discount rate. The Review’s unambiguous conclusions about the need for extreme immediate action will not survive the substitution of discounting assumptions that are consistent with today’s market place. Furthermore, in setting the discount rate as nearly zero and the costs of inaction unrealistic ally high, Stem gives too little weight to the interest of the world’s poor today and in the short to midterm future. In this way, he strongly underestimates the responsibility of the world’s current rich countries to improve the lives of people in poor countries both economically and socially. Acting in this way today would also provide a more stable, coherent and probably even more efficient basis for the fight against climate change.. The politicization of science is the manipulation of science for political gain. It occurs when government, business, or advocacy groups use legal or economic pressure to influence the findings of scientific research or the way it is disseminated, reported or interpreted. The politicization of science may also negatively affect academic and scientific freedom. Historically, groups have conducted various campaigns to promote their interests in defiance of scientific consensus, and in an effort to manipulate public policy.
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