Nature Retracted a Study Predicting Global Economic Catastrophe

In April of 2024, the scientific journal Nature published an article titled “The economic commitment of climate change.” The conclusion of the paper’s authors was that climate change would lead to spectacular catastrophe for the world’s economy both in the medium term and the longer term. This message, that the world’s hair was on fire because of climate change, was immediately picked up and spread far and wide by the media.

A year ago, a paper published in the journal Nature made a sweeping claim: The world economy was already on track to lose 19 percent of global gross domestic product by 2050, compared with what it would have been without climate change. By 2100, under a high-emissions scenario, it predicted that global GDP would be roughly 62 percent lower than without climate change.

Those numbers were a whopping three times higher than previous estimates — sparking concern that climate change would hinder the global economy much more than expected. The paper made waves across social media; according to one analysis by the U.K.-based outlet CarbonBrief, it was the second-most cited climate paper in the media in 2024. The paper’s analysis and dataset, meanwhile, have been used for financial planning by the U.S. government, the World Bank and other institutions.

The degree to which this paper was peak climate alarmism is difficult to overstate. Here’s how Bloomberg reported it at the time:

Climate change will inflict losses to the global economy worth an annual $38 trillion by 2049, as extreme weather ravages agricultural yields, harms labor productivity and destroys infrastructure, according to researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)…

“Climate change will cause massive economic damages within the next 25 years in almost all countries,” Leonie Wenz, the scientist at PIK who led the study, said in a statement . “We have to cut down our emissions drastically and immediately – if not, economic losses will become even bigger in the second half of the century, amounting to up to 60% on global average by 2100.”…

“Structural change towards a renewable energy system is needed for our security and will save us money,” said Anders Levermann, a co-author of the study. “Staying on the path we are currently on will lead to catastrophic consequences.”

A group of central banks called the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), which includes the Federal Reserve Bank, immediately jumped on these results and added them to their own estimates of future catastrophe.

The Network of Central Banks and Supervisors For Greening the Financial System (NGFS) is a supranational consortium of central banks and financial regulators; the United States is represented by the Federal Reserve, the OCC, the FDIC and the FHFA. The NGFS develops climate scenarios that are then used by its members to measure the resiliency of the banking system to climate risks. Thus, the Federal Reserve employed NGFS climate scenarios in its 2023 climate scenario exercise for large U.S. banks…

In early November this year, the NGFS updated the “damage function” component of its climate scenario, which projects the effect of rising temperatures and precipitation on global real income. The new damage function was based entirely on an academic paper published this year in the journal Nature.

The updated damage function predicts that global real income will be 19 percent lower by 2050 than it would have been with no climate change, regardless of whether current CO2 emission trends improve or worsen. The damage function projects 60 percent lower global real income by 2100 if current CO2 emission trends worsen. Going forward, these extreme economic assumptions in the scenarios would be used in climate stress tests of banks, practically ensuring that those tests will conclude that all global banks face material climate risks that would require higher capital levels.

In other words, this wasn’t just more screechy climate catastrophism it was going to have a major impact on banks around the globe. Only it turned out the paper all of this was based on was bogus. Those terrible predictions were not supportable.

In fact, it turned out that most of the bad news was the result of data for just one country: Uzbekistan.

A commentary published Wednesday in Nature found the massive damage predicted by the paper was predicated on data errors stemming from one country — Uzbekistan…

With Uzbekistan removed from the dataset, the predictions dropped substantially — from 62 percent GDP loss in 2100 to 23 percent and from 19 percent by 2050 to 6 percent, said Solomon Hsiang, director of the global policy laboratory at Stanford University and one of the authors of the commentary…

Hsiang and his co-authors, graduate students Tom Bearpark and Dylan Hogan, discovered the error by removing one country at a time from the dataset. Every other country they removed only slightly changed the GDP predictions. But when Uzbekistan was taken out, the results changed dramatically.

Instead of admitting their mistake, the original paper’s authors reran their data, making changes to the Uzbekistan data but also to how the model worked. They claimed their new pass only confirmed their original findings.

Using this altered method, they found results that agreed closely with their original findings. Instead of 19 percent damage by 2050, for example, the new analysis shows 17 percent.

But again, they hadn’t just altered the data, they had altered their methodology. So the two outputs weren’t comparable.

“Science doesn’t work by changing the setup of an experiment to get the answer you want,” Hsiang said. “This approach is antithetical to the scientific method.”

Last week, Nature finally retracted the original article. 

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

The decision came after a team of economists noticed problems with the data for one country, Uzbekistan, that significantly skewed the results…

Lint Barrage, chair of energy and climate economics at ETH Zurich, thinks the retracted paper has other methodological problems having to do with country-level inflation calculations that bias the results upward. Mr. Kotz and Ms. Wenz’s correction note shows that their findings would be “substantially smaller” if they used Ms. Barrage’s preferred approach, which she finds frustrating.

“It can feel sometimes, depending on the audience, that there’s an expectation of finding large 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 a great question. Why should the public trust Nature when it chooses to publish junk science like this and then takes well over a year to retract it?

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