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Another day, another inconvenient truth chips away at the armour of the ‘settled’ climate science. And yet another ‘imminent climate catastrophe!’ paper is quietly retracted. Yet again, the same media who shrieked and trumpeted the study when it was published are resolutely silent as it’s retracted.
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 per cent 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.
This was music to the media’s ears, of course. It fit their pre-ordained narrative to a T. Naturally, they went to town with deafening Chicken Little squawking.
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.
There was only problem: the whole thing was a farrago of errors.
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.
If nothing else, this proves that peer-review pre-publication is increasingly worthless. It’s always been the case that, contrary to the popular ScienceBro narrative, pre-publication peer-review didn’t make a paper unassailable truth. Post-publication has always been where the real science happens. Many a published, peer-reviewed paper has been shredded after publication.
In the ‘post-normal science’ era, it’s only got worse, mostly under the malign influence of ‘climate science’. A handful of powerful activists have bullied sceptical reviews out of their jobs and the whole system has become one of ‘pal review’.
And so we get mendacious garbage like this paper. It may be rubbish, but it’s rubbish that fits the narrative.
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.
So, the real story of the paper is that ‘climate action’ is more costly than doing nothing.
Hey, it’s science.
Peer-reviewed science.
