Jeff Sachs gives a one-page argument for "yes." 

I lean toward a more disaggregated approach, in which the success of aid is not just a matter of political will.  The question is when and where aid will work.  From another direction, this is an insightful paper:

Incumbent political leaders risk being deposed by challengers within existing political rules and by revolutionary threats.  I examine how the survival incentives created by these dual threats shape the e¤ects of aid on government policy.  I use Bueno de Mesquita et al’s (2003) selectorate politics theory to examine the relationship between winning coalition size — the number of supporters a leader requires to retain office — and policy choice.  In large winning coalition systems, the public goods focus of public policy means that foreign aid improves societal welfare and economic development.  In contrast, in small coalition systems the private rewards focus of policy induces a loyalty norm towards incumbents which enables leaders to skim off aid resources for themselves and their cronies.  Further since in small coalition systems aid generates few of the societal benefits that it would under large coalition institutions, aid increases the desire of citizens to rebel.  Leaders can respond to such revolutionary threats by either buying off potential rebels by increasing the supply of public goods or retarding their ability to organize by suppressing public goods.  Aid increases the relative attractiveness of the latter option because aid provides governments with "unearned" revenues that are relatively isolated from the economic decline induced by the suppression of public goods.  The model also implies that aid can retard democratization.

I read that and I thought "today I learned something."  Both pointers are from www.politicaltheory.info.

Addendum: Here is more Sachs, via Mankiw.

Polonium, no license required, as far as I can tell this site is real.  Only $69, just click on "Add to Cart."

Here are the legitimate uses of polonium.  Here is a less than legitimate use.

Thanks to Natasha for the pointer; she pursued some leads from Russian web sites.

Here is Bill Nordhaus’s critique of the Stern report.  Nordhaus argues that Stern’s "new" results boil down to the choice of a lower discount rate.

I agree with Stern that the discount rate should be zero or near-zero for resources which will not be reinvested but rather represent alternative consumption streams across the generations.  If we are doing normative analysis, however, and considering alternatives to controlling global warming, a’ la Copenhagen Consensus, we are by definition considering other investments.  In that case the correct rate of discount is given by opportunity costs, which might be quite high, provided the alternative investments will in fact be undertaken.  (On this topic, there are a few really good comments here.)

Having pondered the report a bit more, my main question is what it would cost for China and India to cut back on carbon emissions, all relevant institutional changes included in the calculations.  In other words, that figure should count costs of persuasion, enforcement, and implementation, not just the cost of one technology rather than another in the abstract.  We do not have a good sense of these costs, and given how many basic tasks these economies fail at, I can imagine the cynic citing the figure of infinity.  (To consider one analogy, what is "the cost" of getting avian flu out of China?)  Furthermore China in particular has a high rate of savings, and both economies have high rates of return on capital.  Current compliance costs should thus be compounded, when considering their future importance, at rates considerably higher than zero.