Ireland Owens
Reporter
A widely-referenced 2024 study that predicted massive global economic damages due to climate change has now been retracted, The New York Times (NYT) reported on Wednesday.
Nature, widely considered to be a prestigious scientific journal, published an article titled “The economic commitment of climate change” in April 2024, which detailed how global gross domestic product (GDP) could be roughly 62% lower by 2100 due to climate change. The journal’s decision to retract the study on Wednesday came after some economists’ discovery that data issues in one country, Uzbekistan, had heavily distorted the results, according to the NYT. (RELATED: Turns Out Major Climate Study Peddled By Media Relied On Bunk Data)
When the team of economists recalculated the results excluding Uzbekistan, the projected climate change damages were similar to previous research, and showed that instead of a projected 62% decrease in global economic output by 2100 due to continuing carbon emissions, global GDP would actually have a 23% reduction, the NYT reported.
When reached for comment, Nature referred the Daily Caller News Foundation to its retraction notice from Wednesday.
Last year, the media breathlessly reported on a study published by Nature that climate change damage could cost $38 trillion per year by 2050.
Nature just retracted the study.
Warning to reporters: If you report on a study published by Nature, there is a good chance it’s BS. pic.twitter.com/eOZ4hY8SK1
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) December 3, 2025
A variety of news outlets previously reported on Nature’s now-retracted study. As of Wednesday, the study has notably been accessed more than 300,000 times, as well as being cited 226 times, according to its article metrics on Nature’s website.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) also mentioned the study in a December 2024 report highlighting the “risks” of climate change to the U.S.
Moreover, the study has also been previously cited by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and was listed in the top 5% of journal articles tracked by Altmetric, a tool that tracks the attention that research outputs, the NYT reported. Similarly, the U.K.-based climate outlet Carbon Brief reported in January that the original study was the second most referenced climate paper in 2024.
Additionally, Americans in major cities no longer view climate change as a top issue, according to an American Communities Project/Ipsos poll released in November.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
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Good article on Nature publishing nonsense. But here’s the question: never mind the false 62% reduction due to continuing carbon emissions, how does the 23% reduction in global GDP get justified?
I’d guess that the 62% were result of the economical takedown by the plandemic and its desired longterm effects + the Blinken administrations hostile attitude towars 2 nuclear powers.
After those 2 are not that relevant anymore and only 1 tool remains ( net zero )
the prediction was also cut down by almost 2/3.
Writers of bogus papers count on NATURE to publish their sloppy nonsense.
There are other such charlatan Media outlets, such as Bloomberg, the Guardian, the BBC, WAPO, the NYT, the WSJ, etc., which have been spouting known
falsities/fake news for many decades.
Such concentrated/powerful Media are a disease, even worse than the COVID hoax.
The US should ban them from US markets
They shouldn’t be banned but reduced in size(which ia already happening)
before they rigged the game in their favor(telecommunication act 1997).
We must reverse operation mockingbird.
On the other hand, once you learn to read the real message they become quite reliable.
Iirc it was Bloomberg that announced 4 weeks ago that only 600 Russians are in Pokrovsk – that was the moment I knew that Pokrovsk has fallen, as such low numbers were impossible with the level of action that was going on at that time in the city.
It goes like this: city X is of crucial strategic importance and party X is controlling it despite party Y’s claims of taking it over. Time passes. Y claims to have taken over city X but party X says it is holding strong and party Y is losing mountains of soldiers.
Then party Y HAS taken over and the media confirms it. Then City X is no longer of strategic importance.
Etc.
Bullshit. Banning is censorship and the next to last refuge of the incompetent.
Thanks, I was trying to think of politer words but SR wrote wrote I was thinking.
Agreed. They should be sued when the situations present themselves.
“The US should ban them from US markets”
Censorship is always wrong but it would be a sweet twist if they used the globalist playbook to ban the blatant misinformation they present as unquestionable facts.
It is not a good situation with a few billionaires owning the mass Media.
It would be much better to break up these agglomerations into many pieces, each owned by a few local people.
It would lead to a far less fake news, and better coverage of local and regional issues.
Take for example Netflix taking over Warner-Brothers-Discovery.
That would put enormous power to influence minds in the hands of very few people.
In the media it is portrayed as a boon for the consumer. I say BS to that.
The only thing that will drop economies by 62% by 2050 (not even 2100) is Draconian Climate Change Policies enacted by Global Governments and the $38 Trillion would be the direct cost of fighting the imaginary dragon Climate Change from the enactment of those same policies also by 2050. Not 2100!
Well,Brian – besides crazy climate policies and war I think the massive debt level all over the world can actually be very harmful at one point.
Especially for countries that went so far green that a recovery becomes impossible as those can then hardly produce the basic levels of needed energy.
Like I said the cost of Policies designed to fight the imaginary dragon Climate Change … The source of much of that debt.
Take a look at the Cloward-Piven strategy to get an idea why so much debt has been accumulated.
People will no longer want to improve their lives. They’ll own nothing and be happy.
Not sure where I saw it- but somewhere I read that the reduction might be something like 3 or 4%- but of course not from today’s worldwide GDP but from a GDP a number of times higher. So, the growth of GDP will be trivially reduced.
I think it was Bjorn Lomborg, in a video.
IIRC, it was Nordhaus (the Nobel Prize winner) that calculated a 3.5% drop in 2100 global GDP related to assumed negative impacts of CO2. Essentially unmeasurable given the massive increases in global GDP.
Right, I saw a video with Lomborg- he mentioned it that’s where he must have gotten that info.
Lomborg video with the Nordhaus & Tol GDP projections at 8:45 into the 19min talk:
https://youtu.be/HWqv6RH-3WE
It should be required viewing in every high school & college [with a quiz afterwards – Lol]
Thanks for the link. I probably sent it to all the climatistas (major players) here in Wokeachusetts but I think I’ll send it again. 🙂 They always seem to ignore my frequent “rants” but I’ve been told that they really read what I write and look at the links- they just don’t want to look bad among their peers by responding. And of course, they don’t have any good responses.
They are using RCP8.5 as their baseline case. This scenario is continuing to be deemed implausible.
A post on all the conditions required to make 8.5 happen would be nice. I agree with JT but I’m about to google for why to avoid being a big hypocrite. I looked at it once before but I can’t remember now whether it was burning to much stuff to get unrealistic CO2 counts or using linear projection on fudged temperature series, or using an impossibly high climate sensetivity number, or…
I’d drop a report here, but even I can’t read the way I write after a few paragraphs – snooze fest. Is Rotter healthy again? He knows how to write.
Update on search… David Middleton wrote some good 8.5-stuff on WUWT about 5 years ago.
“RCP 8.5: The “Mother of all” Junk Climate Science” is a good start.
You’re correct. It would be interesting, and important, to know this. I have read that 8.5 assumes global population to reach 12B by 2100. Or consumption of coal to reverse course then spike. We’re not on that pace.
Not to mention the scenario assigns a high sensitivity of climate to CO2 (amplifications) which fall apart in a simple logic check.
Pielke has been piecing this together. Most research since AR5 uses RCP8.5 as the baseline.
How would one get this detail?
I’ve gone back to the original. IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) was released in stages 2013-2014. It’s been 11+ years since 8.5 was born? And people still use it? This is yet another example in contemporary culture where the generations born around 1950 did fantastic work and handed it off to… nobody?
“AR5 (Fifth Assessment Report) of the IPCC refers to the IPCC’s 2014 climate change assessment, which used Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), a set of scenarios (like RCP2.6, 4.5, 6.0, 8.5) showing different future greenhouse gas levels and radiative forcing, to project climate impacts like temperature rise and extreme weather. These RCPs replaced older SRES scenarios and provide a common framework for climate modeling, with numbers indicating Watts per square meter (\(W/m^{2}\)) of forcing by 2100.
They use it because it was the only baseline provided. There were (3) baselines before the final report was published. The final report referenced all scenarios but only 8.5 was labeled a baseline, even as the IPCC called 8.5 an unlikely scenario, which had confusion as well. Quite stunning stuff.
Pielke goes in to great detail about this. Spencer charted that we were not on this path, at all, in the DOE report. Curry noted her surprise why others (aka Dressler) cling to 8.5 even as so much has come out about its implausibility, while replying to criticism of the DOE report.
Yeah, after research I restored my original opinion. 8.5 is a load of…
“how does the 23% reduction in global GDP get justified?”
By taking the worst projections of models that have been invalidated by empirical observations and then imputing fictional costs to an unknowable future. Never mind that they completely ignore the benefits side of the equation where improving agricultural productivity and greening of the planet benefits life.
There’s no way the trillions being spent on a fictional crisis can be justified. The harms those policies have already caused far exceed the phony benefits claimed.
economists recalculated the results
global GDP would actually have a 23% reduction
…by 2100
Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m convinced. /sarc
Based on the current trend of a resurgent Left here in the US, I’d say a 23% reduction in living standards by 2100 would seem reasonable.
It is much easier for governments to achieve social and economic equality by reducing living standards. The cost of increasing everyone‘s living standards is more than politicians can cope with. On the other hand, young couple’s marriages, new immigrant families, high school and university graduations….are chok-a-bloc full of people intending to increase their living standards…..
I think they are referring to the economies of the US northeast, California, and the debt bomb known as Chicago.
The paper was retracted – all of it. There is nothing in it that has any credibility given the obvious incompetence of the authors.
It’s a good job that peer review works so well, otherwise a lot of climate change modelling nonsense would get published!
Peer reviews are as effective as the vaccine and social distancing.
Friday funny: Doomsday Climate
Support for Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has fallen to just 14 per cent in a damning new opinion poll.
…
Reform UK remains well out in front, with Nigel Farage hoovering up 31 per cent of the vote. – GBN
Clearly, Starmer needs to step up his outreach to the Somali community.
Free khat might help.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/12/going-viral-minneapolis-mayor-jacob-frey-tries-not/
I imagine the Nature study relied on two trees in Uzbekistan, twice as reliable as Dr. Mann.
The trees are safe, Mann’s noted for chopping down journal editors.
This is how alarmism works, dodgy study released with massive fanfare and widely reported, then quietly retracted with a short note on their website and reported by no-one.
The climate change AGENDA, has already wasted that much.. at least !!
“Climate change” translation: “weather”. As in, naturally occurring. Not worse, not better, just weather. Sorry to burst your bubble Nature, but man is not responsible for the weather in any way, shape or form.
Bruce Cobb:
Nonsense!
We have our finger on the scale
Burl, the problem is that we don’t know the size or weight of either the finger or the scale. In a deterministic chaotic system, there is no minimum disturbance which may result in totally unpredictable outcome.
As Lorenz asked “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”, or, conversely, does it prevent a tornado?
Nobody knows.
The not unknown PIK in Germany, co-authored by the also well known Edenhofer was responsible for the retracted “study”.
The “climate change(just as the plandemic) has nothing to do with environment but with redistribution of wealth -Edenhofer?
I was completely wrong, sorry, Levermann was the author. But PIK was corect.
Sorry for the mistake !
The “I” in “PIK” stands for “Institute” .. in this case for the climate insane.
Story tip, check out today’s Electroverse:
The headlines run in unison. WSJ, Axios, USA Today and the rest declared that climate change is about to wipe out $1.5 trillion in U.S. home value.
Not one of these stories came from a scientific journal or a government dataset. They all came from a single marketing report produced by First Street, a private ‘climate-risk’ analytics company that sells insurance-adjacent products to banks, investors, and the real-estate industry. The media treated it as peer-reviewed research. It isn’t.
Florida real estate is booming, thanks to taxpaying REPUBLICANS moving from drowning blue states celebrating widespread, endemic waste, fraud and abuse.
Firststreet has been used in the real estate industry to provide “guidance” regarding future events that might impact a property e.g. flooding potential). I believe that they will be subject to future class action as their projections impact homeowners by diminishing their ability to sell their property as a result of their “estimations.”
This is just one example of how statistics can be end up with ridiculous answers. It is one reason I became a sceptic on a global temperature anomaly.
I keep seeing CAGW advocates when confronted with regions with no growth, simply answer that a GAT doesn’t mean everywhere warms the same. What? If a GAT doesn’t mean the entire globe is warming, then what does it mean? How does one region warming allow portraying the entire globe to be warmer.
The other issue is that when a baseline period is chosen, that essentially means that period has the optimum temperature. One can’t argue that it isn’t and then turn around and jump up and down about warming dooming the earth to hot house temperatures. Logically, the hypothesis and conclusion combine into a false conditional statement. Logically, one should use the immediate previous 30 years (or more) as a baseline to obtain a better indicator of annual growth. .
“a global temperature “
Is an imaginary idea.
I agree that a “global temperature” by itself, is essentially meaningless and not truly determinable. No one experiences a global temperature, whether it’s either intrinsic or extrinsic or neither. It’s truly “imaginary”.
However, my local air temperature is quite important to me. I spend a lot of time outdoors, and almost always use the air temperature to determine what I wear outside. it’s both useful, and accurate.
I agree that averaging my outdoor temperature with yours is useless. However, if determined properly, an average temperature of earth can be useful. It also can be useless, if not determined properly.
Is it going up over time, or down over time, and by how much? That’s the question of the century. More ink, and now bytes, have been spent on that question than any other in the past few decades. Does it mean the end of the Holocene interglacial, and glaciers will destroy NYC, Chicago, and Scotland, or will glacial melting sink Miami, LA, and the UK below the sea? The answer depends on global temperature over the next few centuries.
That makes it important and it must be determined accurately.
“However, if determined properly, an average temperature of earth can be useful.”
How so?
“Is it going up over time, or down over time, and by how much?”
Whether an average goes up or down depends on weighting. If thermometers in cities are going up, but those in rural areas are stable or going down, then your average isn’t telling you anything except that cities are getting warmer.
“I agree that averaging my outdoor temperature with yours is useless.”
But that’s exactly what’s happening. Averaging Pittsburgh with Spitzbergen is useless.
The closest thing we have to accurate measurements of atmospheric temperatures (the only measurement that matters) is UAH6. It says that for an almost 1/2 century period beginning in 1979 the average land/sea global warming is a paltry 0.16 C/decade.
[NB: 1979 was the end of over a decade of global cooling, the coldest period since the end of the Little Ice Age in about 1850. The Little Ice Age was the coldest period on record for the entire approximately 11,500 year Holocene Interglacial. Conveniently, the temperatures of the Little Ice Age are the metric used to evaluate concern related to current ‘global warming.’]
And there is nothing in UAh to indicate that human released CO2 has had anything to do with the slight warming.
All the warming has occurred at El Nino events as a spike+step warming in energy release from the ocean to the atmosphere.
Energy into the oceans is from THE SUN, CO2 has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Thats a bit silly, isn’t it? What has land/sea temperature got to do with poorly estimated “atmospheric temperature”? For example, bitumen road temperature may exceed 50 C, in air temperatures of 25 C.
Now, if something heated the air from 24 C to 25 C, would it be reflected in a change in the surface temperature? That’s a rhetorical question, because only foolish and ignorant people believe that there is any direct correlation between air and surface temperatures. People like “climate scientists”.
How about you?
Recording how hot thermometers are is generally useless.
Tom Johnson,
Re global average temperatures.
You say that they need to be accurate, but how can you estimate their accuracy?
There will be a bracket of uncertainty around that estimate.
But how can you estimate that uncertainty?
Take the textbook Guide to the Estimation of Uncertainty in Measurement, GUM, from the France based International Bureau of Weights and Measures, BIPM. It cannot be used with global average temperatures because it applies only to original observations, excluding any mention of adjusted or invented numbers. It follows logically that a global average temperature, however used, should not be used because it is a construct without an acceptable scientific basis.
Geoff S
Sometimes, no doubt. The air can be below freezing, but you can still be badly burnt by the Sun. Your body tends to let you know whether you feel comfortable, and need to add or remove layers. Thermometers don’t respond to wind, hence weather reports often using “feels like” temperatures. Temperature, by itself, is of little use.
That’s your opinion, which is equally worthless to my diametrically opposed opinion. Determine away, but don’t expect me to pay for it.
If So Many other Papers are built on the backbone of this Disgraced Paper shouldn’t they also be redone to remove both the references to as well as any data utilized that was associated with this paper?
“shouldn’t they also be redone”
I would think so. The other papers are using bogus data and should correct their papers.
If I had to guess it would be upwards of 97% of all papers published since 1988 are built on the back of some other bogus paper
Arrhenius’s initial paper comes to mind !
The whole of climate modelling comes from his non-earth imagining of the atmosphere.
Trust Nature (Certainly not the fine magazine which is now a biased rag)
Definitely a biased rag.
They’re mistake was sharing the data and model. Mann still holds back on his retraction eligible woork.
Hopefully those climate realists that were silenced will now be given platforms and be listened to.
One decent ‘small step’, but given other reporting on economic impacts of climate change as being no more than a 3% reduction in GROWTH of GDP, this ‘20% reduction in GDP by 2100’ is still alarming and likely erroneous.
In other words, while the climate cabal has mud on their face they’re already pivoting to ‘yeah sure, the vastly invalid value was reported but still…look at that 20% reduction! We must do something NOW!”
When they retract MBH98 and all the others that “independently” verified it, then maybe, just maybe, I’ll start believing they’re coming to their senses.
We all get together and go mango-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/how-to-make-climate-stories-impossible-to-ignore-katherine-dunn-ted/vi-AA1MNvjt
Hopefully the administrations efforts in investigating fraud in journals will result in more of this and prosecutions!
When they set out on this hoax, did they really think it would go for ever? 50 years? Maybe 20 years? They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Now they will quietly morph into the next hoax. No confession, no admission that they got it wrong, just a relentless retention of power and control over the public dialogue.
George Orwell knew how they operated, and why.
ALL these projections about the effect of climate change on the economy are made up, INCLUDING the one put forward by Bjorn Lomborg.
There is nothing to calculate here because history is non linear. It’s always: ‘events, my dear’.
There is no zero point of departure. This is fake ‘science’, including everything related to GDP. It is a comfort blanket to create an illusion that is supposed to indicate whatever purpose is aimed at.
New sign: The End is Nay.
What are you? A naysayer?
Off with ye! Begone!<g>
While this is good news I want to know who did the study, what outfit sponsored it, who paid for it and how did it pass peer review? I want names, everybody needs to be held accountable for doing shoddy work, approving shoddy work and paying for shoddy work, not only shoddy but dishonest. There is no excuse for lying, cheating and crappy work, it is not okay.
The bogus study claims a 62% reduction in global GDP relative to a baseline without climate impacts by 2100. The other bogus studies estimate a 23% reduction instead. They’re all wrong. Just like the fabricated EPA “endangerment finding,” the calculated “cost” of “carbon pollution” and the nonsense “offsets” that the gullible could “purchase,” and the crazy “climate sensitivity” and “radiative forcing” numbers, it’s based on unverified assumptions, cherry-picked data, ignoring a bunch of unknowns, and (mostly) voodoo.
Let’s see a study that calculates the real and negative impact of leftist climate policies on GDP right now, starting with unnecessarily higher energy costs and reduction in energy reliability and the cascade of negative effects from that.
More climate change in Indonesia-
How decades of deforestation turned Asia’s floods into one of the deadliest weather events of 2025
We’re all doomed. No?
I wonder how many ignorant and gullible people that represents? Of course, one has to add the ignorant and gullible reviewers, and editors, who accepted the errors (nonsense?) that led to the paper’s retraction.
Springer Nature was forced to retract 2,923 articles in 2024, which points to the ignorance and gullible of the reviewers and editors involved. No refunds.
My God, how the money rolls in!