Without fossil fuels we would not have experienced the spectacular economic benefits seen today around the world

The great climate hockey stick trial ended Wednesday in Washington, a libel and science battle between journalist Mark Steyn and climate scientist Michael E. Mann. The jury’s decision sets the stage for debate over free speech and the quality of the climate science used to justify the global campaign to rid the world of fossil fuels.

Missing from the trial, and the ongoing ideological clash over climate change, is another hockey stick, one that economists have been musing about for some time: The GDP hockey stick. While the temperature version under scrutiny at trial plots 1,000 years of speculative reconstructions of temperature history, the GDP hockey sticks deals with harder real data.

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The Mann-Steyn trial, outlined here last week and reproduced by steynonline, focused in part on a 1998 graph shaped like a hockey stick developed by Michael Mann. Mann and others claim the graph provides statistical evidence that the use of fossil fuels led to a sharp rise in global temperatures in the 20th century.

The graph, leaving aside problems with the temperature measurement techniques, is one of the major selling points for national and international mega-plans to decarbonize the global economy down to net-zero emissions by 2050.

Missing from policy-making thinking is another hockey stick. Developed by British economist Angus Maddison, the GDP graph posits a thousand years of flatline global growth until the 18th century, when it began a major surge. Through the 19th and 20th centuries, GDP measured in........

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