If you do not trust the International Panel on Climate Change you should probably not trust the Nobel Prize for economics.

Yale economist William Nordhaus has just won the highest honour in his profession partly for his work on the economics of climate change.

His modelling calculated the costs of investing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and then compared them to the social and economic costs of doing nothing and just allowing temperatures to rise. The bottom line was that investment in emissions reduction was a lot better value.

By coincidence, Professor Nordhaus' work provided the economic foundation for the International Panel on Climate Change report also released on Monday which urged the world to take more "rapid and far reaching" measures to cut emissions.

The IPCC report found that it still worth taking the fairly drastic action required to limit the increase in global temperatures to a rise of 1.5 degrees by 2050 as a result of global warming as compared to going slow and allowing for a bigger rise in temperature.