UK Office of Budget Responsibility’s Latest Climate Fear Mongering Claims Based on Junk Findings From Retracted Nature Paper 

From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Chris Morrison

One of the biggest scandals so far in climate science publishing has suckered in a number of government policy advisers around the world including the UK Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). Last July, the British Budget-leaking bunglers estimated that the country’s Gross National Product (GNP) would be 7.8% less in 50 years’ time due to the effect of human-caused climate change. Newly-revised ‘climate impact’ figures suggest that annual borrowing to fund the national debt would be over £50 billion higher at 2025 prices. The claims update and increase previous September 2024 guesses due to “several significant developments… in the evidence base”. An in-depth investigation by the Daily Sceptic can reveal that these updated figures are junk since they are linked directly to the disgraced paper called Kotz et al (KLW24) that was retracted this month by Nature. 

The OBR is not alone in having statistical egg all over its face since the work that arose from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, a known nest of hard line climate activists, was widely used by other government organisations including the US Congressional Budget Office, the OECD and the World Bank. All seem to have relied on a so-called damage impacts model found in KLW24 that produced the headline claim that the world would be poorer over the next century by $78 trillion due to humans fiddling with the climate thermostat. Catsnip of course, to mainstream climate catastrophising clots with suggestions from the Green Blob-funded Climate Brief that the paper was the second most featured climate work in the media last year.

Now it has all ended in tears and disgrace. The Nature retraction has been long (too long!) in coming since it has been obvious for some time that the paper was riddled with fatal flaws. The authors had admitted that the errors were too substantial for a correction.

The OBR’s latest estimates of climate damage are based on a rise of 3°C from pre-industrial times and are “informed by NGFS Phase V”. This is a key admission. For its economic damages projections, the OBR relied on Network for Greening the Financial System scenarios which explicitly incorporated the Kotz et al paper. This information updates a NGFS damage function model that estimates GDP losses from climate impacts. Comments in the OBR report along with footnotes reference both NGFS Phase V and Kotz et al. “The most recent data and updated modelling suggest that the damage to GDP from climate change is likely to be more severe than previously thought”, observes the OBR.

The NGFS was set up at the height of the recent Green Mania by a consortium of central banks and supervisory authorities. It produces research and scenario development along with what is called best practice sharing on climate and environmental risks in finance. It has a distinctly turn of the decade feel about it with the financial and business world now moving on from its pie-in-the-sky platitudes. The connection with the Kotz paper is unlikely to improve its image, particularly with the government organisations that fell hook, line and sinker for its Phase V inventions. It still claims support in around 90 countries but not, alas, in the most important financial country in the world. It didn’t take long for Trump in America to withdraw the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Department of the Treasury.

In April 2024, a hysterical Guardian went into climate catastrophising overdrive by reporting the Kotz guess that world income would fall by a nearly a fifth within 26 years. The political clickbait kicker was clearly displayed in the Guardian’s first paragraph with a note that “the costs of damage will be six times higher than the price of limiting global heating to 2°C”. Lead author Maximillian Kotz was noted to claim that the strong income reductions were caused by climate impacts on, amongst others, agricultural yields, labour productivity and infrastructure. To date, the Guardian does not seem to have thought it necessary to inform its readers about the retraction, nor has it made any corrections to its original fantasy report.

What is wrong with the Kotz paper? Where to begin? It appears that it suffered from a combination of data inaccuracies and methodology shortcomings that fundamentally undermined the core predictions of climate-driven economic damage. The problems appear to have cascaded through the report and were acknowledged as too substantial for a mere correction. Almost unbelievably, it appears that problems over a Uzbekistan economic dataset from 1995–1999 led to model estimates of temperature impacts on growth inflating global projections by a factor of around three. For their part, the authors have issued a revised paper for ‘peer review’ with slightly lower catastrophising claims. But the world is moving on from Net Zero and the market for scary nonsense is diminishing by the day.

The OBR needs to amend its figures in the light of the Kotz retraction. The NGFS has acknowledged the central role played by Kotz in underpinning the physical risk estimates in Phase V. It has advised users to consider this limitation when making up, pardon, calculating its own figures using the scenarios. 

After this scientific car crash, it might be preferable for the OBR to get out of the climate catastrophising business altogether. Any serious number-crunching economist should be appalled at having to report fantasy figures produced by useless computer climate models. In addition, it is patently obvious that the OBR knows little about the science of climate change. In the first paragraph, it promotes its fictional impact report by quoting a recent five-year temperature record. That short period is practically weather, not a meaningful climate trend. It then goes on to suggest that the UK economy is facing “increasingly volatile and extreme weather”, a common scare that is not backed up by the data. Then it reports that temperatures will continue to rise until the emission of all ‘greenhouse’ gases reach zero, a claim that has no validity based on observations and measurements in both the historical and paleo climate records.

It seems not to have occurred to the OBR that an extreme Net Zero solution will lead to world starvation, death on a truly shocking scale, economic collapse and global societal breakdown. Even the Guardian would baulk at reporting on the almost unimaginable cost of all that.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.