Thursday, December 4, 2025

The Climate hysterics rake another hit

Oops! Prestigious Science Journal Retracts Climate Study That Predicted Imminent Economic Catastrophe


Hoo boy. Sometimes, you might do something so embarrassing, so humiliating, that you want to hide in the closet. The prestigious science journal Nature may be thinking about doing that right about now, because on Wednesday, they officially retracted an influential 2024 climate report that predicted gloom and doom, death and misery, and impending economic catastrophe.

In April 2024, the prestigious journal Nature released a study finding that climate change would cause far more economic damage by the end of the century than previous estimates had suggested. The conclusion grabbed headlines and citations around the world, and was incorporated in risk management scenarios used by central banks.

On Wednesday, Nature retracted it, adding to the debate on the extent of climate change’s toll on society.

Shocker — it seems as if they were relying on flawed data.­

The decision came after a team of economists noticed problems with the data for one country, Uzbekistan, that significantly skewed the results. If Uzbekistan were excluded, they found, the damages would look similar to earlier research. Instead of a 62 percent decline in economic output by 2100 in a world where carbon emissions continue unabated, global output would be reduced by 23 percent.


Meanwhile, Nature said in a statement on their website: “The authors acknowledge that these changes are too substantial for a correction, leading to the retraction of the paper.” The researchers are reworking the article with the updated data and hope to have a peer-reviewed version ready in the near future.

Their predictions are all still of the “we’re all going to die” variety, however, even with the updated data, but it’s hard to take what they say at face value when they just screwed up this badly in one of the major scientific journals in the world.

Lint Barrage, chair of energy and climate economics at The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), pointed to other potential flaws in the study and had an excellent observation about confirmation bias: “It can feel sometimes, depending on the audience, that there’s an expectation of finding large [climate damage] estimates,” Ms. Barrage said. “If your goal is to try to make the case for climate change, you have crossed the line from scientist to activist, and why would the public trust you?”

That’s my question, too.


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