The Guardian reports that Sir David King, Chief Scientific Advisor to HMG, previewed the report due any time now from Sir Nicholas Stern on the economic costs of climate change:

Tackle climate change or face deep recession, world's leaders warned

Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser, yesterday gave the Guardian a preview of its main findings. Speaking at a climate change conference in Birmingham, he said: "All of [Stern's] detailed modelling out to the year 2100 is going to indicate first of all that if we don't take global action we are going to see a massive downturn in global economies." He added: "If no action is taken we will be faced with the kind of downturn that has not been seen since the great depression and the two world wars." Sir David called the review "the most detailed economic analysis that I think has yet been conducted".

Head, meet brick wall. Surely if we have learned anything from the twentieth century it is that economics cannot beat nature (or human nature). All the economic theories in the world might sound lovely, but they are just that - human constructs. If those human constructs mean, in the worst' analyses, the virtual annihilation of a third of the world's flora and fauna species and terrible deprivation for the human species on an unprecedented scale, then the models have to change.

There is a time for Keynesian spending to stave off utter disaster surely? If we simply don't act because we don't "have the money" to act, and in the process render human life an utter misery, what the hell will the economists have proved? Only that pig-headedness can kill more than all the fascist dictators the planet has seen.

All the talk of a few measures here and there just don't stack up. If we want super efficient homes, nearing self-sufficiency in energy and water supplies, if we want the human capital to keep economies running, we need to spend now for the future. You can have all the accumulated wealth in the world, but what is it worth if there's nobody left to produce things for you to spend it on? For that's the reality of what they are saying.

Look at the sort of things we need to do to reduce our emissions. Transport is a biggie. We always hear that we can't afford to build this rapid rail link or another. Create the money to do so and take it back again out of the land value rises those new links create. How is it inflationary if you remove from the system the same money you created to build the links?

The problems in the seventies in particular that we are always worried about returning to were not about capital expenditure so much as revenue expenditure - inflation busting wage rises and so on fuelling inflation in themselves, with no way of removing the money from the system when it was no longer needed. We have the ability to manufacture goods which will help us out of these hot, rising, water levels, but won't do so because the money isn't there right now to do it.

It's bonkers.