This is a guest post by Brandon Shollenberger 

Global warming is, if you'll forgive the pun, possibly the most heated topic of debate this century.  While most debate over it focuses on extreme weather, sea level rise and climatic events, there is another part.  This is the part that focuses on the economics of global warming.  That is, how will global warming affect our wallets?

At the forefront of this debate is Richard Tol, professor of economics at the University of Sussex.  His work on the economics of global warming is relied upon by climate skeptics like Matt Ridley, who has used it to argue, “Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century,” based on graphs like:

In this DeSmog UK epic history post we meet David Henderson, who accidentally became one of the IPCC’s fiercest opponents.

David Henderson is a fellow of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) where he is valued as an eloquent and modest advocate of radical free market capitalism. But, his engagement with climate scepticism “came about in an entirely unplanned and fortuitous way.”

The former head of the economic division of the state-funded international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) was, in April 2003, spending his retirement busily devising a book which he planned to call False Consensus: Dark Visions and Collectivist Remedies.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change plays an enormous role in shaping how climate science gets translated into policy in countries around the world, but so does the media.

A new report finds that, while the IPCC could have managed the rollout of its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) better, lack of compelling coverage, especially in US media, is leading to less public demand for action and hence political will to adopt policies to deal with climate change.

The report, published in Nature Climate Change, examines how the IPCC’s release strategy around AR5 contributed to diminishing returns in terms of media coverage, as well as the ways media outlets chose to frame the issue and how that impacts public perception of climate issues.

Researchers with the University of Exeter studied print, broadcast, and online media in both the US and the UK and found that the biggest difference was that there is simply more climate coverage in the UK. A lot more: three times as many articles and five times as many broadcasts were dedicated to climate change in the UK as in the US.

This article has been cross-posted from Carbon Brief

Dr Rajendra Pachauri has stepped down from his role as chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), effective today.

After nearly 13 years in the job, Pachauri was due to step down later this year. However, his departure has been brought forward pending allegations of sexual harassment at the New Delhi-based research centre TERI, where he is director general.

Pachauri has strongly denied the allegations, saying his personal email account had been hacked to send inappropriate messages to a colleague.