A Climate Study Retraction for the Ages

A much-hyped study in the journal Nature turns out to have been full of errors.

One scandal of our age is the attempt to sell the public on the narrative of climate catastrophe. It’s been fed by the press and overheated political and scientific claims that sometimes are phony. That’s the story with the journal Nature’s retraction of a highly publicized climate study that made headlines.

Steam rising from a coal-fired power station in Datteln, Germany. ina fassbender/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The study was a shocker when it was first published in April 2024. Scientists at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research projected that climate change could cause $38 trillion in economic damage a year by 2049. To put that number in perspective, the GDP of North America last year was about $31.4 trillion. The study’s finding would mean that storms, heat waves and other calamities, supposedly caused by climate change, would wipe out the equivalent of the North American economy, and then some, every year.

The study also forecast that rising CO2 emissions would cause a 62% reduction in global GDP by 2100, and that damage over the next quarter of a century would exceed the costs of mitigating global warming by six times.

Progressives hyped the study to argue that government interventions like electric-vehicle mandates are worth the cost. The study “shines a new light on the patterns and severity of climate change’s economic impacts while bolstering key conclusions from other research,” reported Axios, a leading promoter of the climate-scare narrative.

Yet not long after the study was published, other scientists flagged problems with its methodology and errors in its data. In July 2024, Nature issued a correction noting that rows of data were “wrongly printed as a decimal, rather than a percentage point.”

Other scientists wrote in a comment to Nature—akin to a newspaper letter to the editor—that the study “underestimates uncertainty . . . rendering their results statistically insignificant when properly corrected.”

Still other scientists in August noted in a comment that “data anomalies arising from one country” in the “underlying GDP dataset, Uzbekistan, substantially bias their predicted impacts of climate change.” When the Uzbekistan data was removed and statistical uncertainty corrected for, the results were no longer “statistically distinguishable from mitigation costs at any time this century.”

In other words, the economic harm from climate change no longer exceeded the costs of the government interventions to do something to arrest warming temperatures.

The study had so many errors that Nature has now retracted it, but what an embarrassment. “Post-publication, the results were found to be sensitive to the removal of one country, Uzbekistan, where inaccuracies were noted in the underlying economic data for the period 1995–1999,” the retraction says.

The retraction is also a black eye for the Network for Greening the Financial System, a group of central banks and financial regulators that incorporated the study’s projections into its bank climate stress test scenarios. The Federal Reserve belonged to the network until Chair Jerome Powell withdrew in January.

One question is why the study’s glaring errors weren’t caught by peer reviewers before it was published. One culprit might be conformity bias, as reviewers didn’t want to gainsay findings that support the narrative that humanity is killing the planet and the entire world economy must be rearranged to prevent it. When politics is in the saddle, the chances of bad science increase.

If progressives want to know why so many Americans don’t believe claims of the climate apocalypse, it’s because so much of climate science has been shown to be unbelievable.