Any thorough analysis of policy on climate change must examine scientific, economic, and political issues and many other relationships and structures and must have ethics at its heart. In a Policy Forum in this issue of Science, Nordhaus (1) suggests that our results as described in the Stern Review (2) stem almost entirely from ethical judgments. This is not correct. In addition to revisiting the ethics, we also incorporated the latest science, which tells us that, for a given change in atmospheric concentration, the worst impacts now appear more likely. Further, the science also now gives us a better understanding of probabilities, so we could incorporate explicit risk analysis, largely overlooked in previous studies. It is risk plus ethics that drive our results.
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Stern et al. (2007) studied this question.