Audrey Streb
DCNF Energy Reporter
A 2024 climate change study amplified by the corporate press projecting up to $38 trillion in global climate damages by 2050 relied on inaccurate data, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
The study’s inclusion of Uzbekistan’s faulty GDP figures skewed its results and cast doubt on its conclusion that global GDP could be roughly 62% lower by 2100 due to climate change than it otherwise would be, according to the Post. Numerous prominent media outlets touted the study upon its release as proof of climate change’s imminent economic threat, but a new analysis and experts who spoke to the Post argue the paper is undermined by Uzbekistan’s “data anomalies.”
The original study was the second-most cited paper across media in 2024, according to the U.K.-based climate outlet Carbon Brief.
“The only GDP that is set to plummet is the GDP of fraudulent self-promoting climate activists who are about to finally and appropriately get their funding cut by the Trump administration,” President of the Heartland Institute James Taylor told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Common sense and actual peer-reviewed studies show that warmer weather saves lives, with nearly 20 times more people dying from cold than heat, that warmer temperatures and more atmospheric CO2 are stimulating a blooming of greenery throughout the planet, and crop production sets records nearly every year with longer growing seasons and more atmospheric CO2.” (RELATED: Trump Admin’s New Report Blows Massive Hole In The Left’s Climate Catastrophe Narrative)
The U.S. government has even cited the study, with one December 2024 Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report referencing it to illustrate the risks climate change poses to the American economy.
Once Uzbekistan was removed from the dataset, projected GDP losses dropped sharply, from 62% to 23% by 2100, and from 19% to 6% by 2050, Hsiang told the Post. Hsiang and his two co-authors, graduate students Tom Bearpark and Dylan Hogan, reportedly uncovered the error after erasing one nation at a time from the data collection and observing that Uzbekistan’s absence drastically shifted the results, according to the Post. The authors found that Uzbekistan’s GDP records showed wild oscillations incongruent with purportedly more reliable World Bank data, which reflected less intense fluctuations, according to the outlet.
“Everybody who works with data has some responsibility to look at the data and make sure it’s fit for purpose,” Global Policy Laboratory Director at Stanford University Solomon Hsiang, who helped point out the error, told the Post. “When you have a lot of data points, the idea that a small country could be so influential is not intuitive.”
Nature editor Karl Ziemelis wrote to the Post that his publication is reviewing the study and that “appropriate editorial action would be taken once the matter was resolved.” The report’s original authors told the outlet that the Uzbekistan data flub was a processing error that was corrected in an updated analysis, though they believe the report still holds up.
“We are grateful, and I think it’s a good part of the scientific process that they’ve pointed out these issues,” Leonie Wenz, professor of environmental economics at the Technical University of Berlin and one author of the initial study, told the Post. “But importantly, the main conclusions of the paper hold, and there are only slight changes to the estimates.”
The massive GDP loss scale was flagged during the peer review process, one review noting that “I find all of this well explained and fairly convincing, yet, purely subjectively, I have a hard time in believing the results, which seem unintuitively large given damages aren’t perfectly persistent.”
Nature, Wenz, his coauthors Maximilian Kotz and Anders Levermann, Hsiang, Bearpark and Hogan did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
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Global GDP, and people’s overall well being, would be diminished even more if the pursuit of Net Zero continues.
GDP, not necessarily. GDP involves «a measure of the money price of all new, domestically produced, final goods and services in an economy in a year relative to the real value of them». And is set by the cabinets arbitrarily via their opinion on «the real value», which as the above clearly implies is not a function of observable monetary prices. And, of course, monetary prices themselves depend on inflation. You can see where this could roll.
If inflation goes supersonic as it does in many sinking economies, these monetary prices go up while total volume of services and goods sinks…
Then the real voodoo starts, as the economists get their masks and tambourines, stand in a circle and convert prices into the «real value» — sublime and distinct from the mundane objectively measurable numbers like prices. Of course, the learned economists may find it reasonable to appraise the real value of goods and services which harm (or offend) the Spirit Whales to be lower than it appears to the uninitiated, while the ones enjoyed by Spirit Whales, conversely, should be given higher real value multipliers.
Spending money on windmills and solar for power has greatly increased energy costs in most jurisdictions and already likely lowered GDP by 10% or more.
First off, Uzbekistan? Why would anyone include Uzbekistan data in any global study? Such a puny dataset is meaningless even if it were correct.
Second, if Uzbekistan throws a study off by “from 62% to 23% by 2100, and from 19% to 6% by 2050”, then it sounds like Uzbekistan must have been 2/3 of the data in that dataset, which by itself makes the entire study suspect. Imagine someone wanting to study the US GDP and basing it primarily on Caspar, Wyoming.
Nature sure has sunk a long ways if they accepted such a lousy study. Where’d they get their peer reviewers, from a bunch of second graders sending in Kellog’s Cornflakes boxtops?
And $2.95 for postage and handling?
A few tenths of a degree is going to cause the economy of the world to collapse.
Really?
I doubt if Wenz & his coauthors have a few tenths of a true academic degree between them if they can produce rubbish like that !!!
Maybe they bought their degrees on eBay??
The first question I like to ask temperature doomers is the difference between yesterday’s maximum and minimum temperatures, then query them why there’s been no calamity due to the (comparatively) large difference between them. (well compared to “1.5C over 100 years”) I can move on to weekly, monthly and annual high/lows and ask the same question.
Yet they want me to believe a minimal change over a century will have devastating consequences ?
“Yet they want me to believe a minimal change over a century”
A change which could easily / probably be a complete fantasy, anyway. !
I am deathly afraid of what will happen in 2100 to the global GDP.
According to “them” the world has warmed since the Industrial Revolution, and GDP has of course massively increased.
Obviously, warming allows GDP to INCREASE not decrease. 😉
And anyone who things they can predict “climate” or GDP out to 2100, should be taken as being a complete idiot
That is a great point of view and observation.
“Warming is all post industrialisation and global GDP has constantly improved”.
We might also mention the life expectancy of humanity has doubled plus the number of well nourished people living on Earth has increased eight fold…!
What is there not to like about record harvests record numbers of humans and record human achievement?
Correlation does not define causation will be the counter argument.
Warming led to industrialization.
Warming led to substantial growth (GDP being one metric).
Warming led to a substantial increase in life expectancy.
So what does cooling do?
Curious minds want to know.
Just the short version because I’m on an IPad in the jungle:
“They know we know they lie yet they still lie.”
Figures lie, and liars figure. And Climate Liars figure they can lie about everything.
relied on inaccurate data
Climate sceance is wholly dependent upon tortured and even fake data.
But then, we know that.
Maybe even a Ouija board or two.
The major arcana of a Tarot deck…
Another prophecy from the climate guy called Nostra-Dumbass. !!
By “global climate damages” do they mean weather events impacting greater infrastructure and inflation? Do they project more, and more intense, weather based on current ‘climate’ models?
With reliable electrical energy more widespread, more wealth, and better preparation I think the relative damages will decline.
I’d place a bet* if I expected to be around in 2050 to collect my big win.
*See: Simon-Ehrlich wager
Many of the billion dollar weather cost attribution studies rely on the Consumer Price Index, not inflation.
Hillary’s win the day legal and political moves also apply to corporate news reporting on climate.
It’s absurd to think anyone can accurately calculate an unknown quantity. I would like to see their calculations.
There’ll be a step called “a miracle happens here”, which they’ll leave up to expert judgment what that means. And the expert will rule it to be whatever fits the narrative of the study.
And they’ll tell you to disprove it and show how.
There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on our global climate system. The climate change that we have been experiencing is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. World wide trillions of dollars have been spent trying to fight climate change yet no one is saying that there has been any improvement. Mankind does not even know what the optimal global climate is let alone how to achieve it. Spending money to fight climate change is just a big waste of funds.
Wherever you settle, that’s optimal for you.
Of course. And the related question would be: has anyone got concrete evidence of CO2 emissions causing economic damage? Any at all, to date? Or is it all just models and guesswork?
(for the purpose of this question, I’m excluding the Lake Nyos disaster, of course, which definitely caused immediate economic and health harm as a direct result of CO2 emissions from the lake)
Despite the hype, there is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on our global climate system. The AGW hypothesis has been falsified by science.
For all we know, and that is terrifying little, we could still be progressing TOWARDS a climate optimum.
The holocene optimum was some 8,000 years ago. Ever since the Earth has been cooling but not uniformily. Our modern intergalcial period is slowily ending. What may be the optimum climate for some is not the optimum climate for all. No one knows how to prevent extreme weather events.
The climate alarmist mainstream media is becoming more unreliable in presenting the real facts whenever it activates its supposedly updated doomsday scenarios or tries to convince listeners/viewers/readers. Canada’s CBC is among the worst of them as just last week it presented a piece on its national news claiming how China has been weaning itself off oil by turning to more windfarms and solar panels for electricity generation to thereby encourage more adoption of EVs.. What it conveniently forgot to mention is that despite the veracity of this fact, the country’s carbon emissions have risen 70% during the past two decades, its annual coal consumption is by far the greatest in the world, and it hasn’t paused its relentless construction of new coal plants. Nor was there any mention of its continuing use of natural gas. Yet by overemphasizing renewable energies and downplaying the continued domination of fossil fuels, it tries to give the impression that China is to emulated in emissions reductions. .
One dollar is probably an exaggeration in my study.
I am floored! Where have I heard this about global average temperature?
The idea that a single small tree could be so influential is not intuitive, either. Whether you have a lot of data points or not.
Hold their feet to the fire there is no room for lying and cheating in science.
It should have said:
“up to $38 trillion in
global climateRENEWABLE ENERGY damages by 2050″Does this paper have an explanation of how increased CO2 and minor warming can cause degradation of any country’s GDP? I don’t see how it can and I don’t know of any evidence that it has.
How much of the record setting crop production has to do with vastly improved and improving technology, hybrids, more effective pesticides, and high-tech irrigation techniques?
If the data handling error/misallocation had resulted in a growth of GDP worldwide, you can bet your life they would have spotted it before publication.
Even the peer review concern was waved away because the scale of the negative played perfectly into the alarmists style and game plan.
Why be sceptical about conclusions when the name of the climate alarmism approach is over hype and fabrication of data.
Why bother with rural location weather data stations when urban locations provide desired results?
Why bother with actual data when man made data is so much easier?
Why bother with actual weather stations when you can have 103 imaginary ones Met Office UK.
Why bother with peer review when any dissenting comment is ignored?
Why bother with science when propaganda is so much cheaper and available?
If the results are so dependent on only a few inputs it means the algorithm used to extrapolate is inherently unstable. Rubbish in rubbish out. But what does one expect from a climate model?
.
Anything that includes GDP is not “data”, it’s a joke.
Long explanation here., courtesy of Mencius Moldbug.
Summary: measured GDP (which the economists calls “nominal”) starts full of fudge via picking what is or is not measured; it also necessarily depends on inflation — which itself strongly depends directly on the control input of economy: fiat currency emission and policies of state banks. Then adjusted (do some readers here chuckle at this very word?) GDP (which the same economists call “real” for some reason) is derived from that measured value by post-processing it via… mathematical model of the hedonic treadmill.
If that is not a Jenga tower of fudge, what ever is?
How does one project with any kind of objectivity, let alone accuracy world GDP 25 years from now, let alone next year?
Oh. Models. Forgot.
/sarc
😎
Climate models plus financial models projecting 25 to 75 years into the future. What’s not to trust?