HEADLINE: “The Journal Nature’s Retraction of a Highly Publicized Climate Study, By Doug Sheridan

“The WSJ Editorial Board writes, one scandal of our age is the attempt to sell the public on the narrative of climate catastrophe. It’s been fed by the press and overheated political and scientific…”

The WSJ Editorial Board writes, one scandal of our age is the attempt to sell the public on the narrative of climate catastrophe. It’s been fed by the press and overheated political and scientific claims.

That’s the story with the journal Nature’s retraction of a highly publicized climate study. The study was a shocker when it was published in April 2024. Scientists at Germany’s PIK - Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research projected climate change could cause $38 trillion in economic damage a year by 2049.

The study also forecast rising CO2 emissions would cause a 62% reduction in global GDP by 2100, and that damage over the next quarter of a century would exceed the costs of mitigating global warming by six times.

Progressives hyped the study to argue gov’t interventions like EV mandates are worth the cost. The study “shines a new light on the patterns and severity of climate change’s economic impacts while bolstering key conclusions from other research,” reported Axios, a leading promoter of the climate-scare narrative.

Yet not long after the study was published, other scientists flagged problems with its methodology and errors in its data. Other scientists wrote in a comment to Nature Portfolio that the study “underestimates uncertainty... rendering their results statistically insignificant when properly corrected.”

In August scientists noted that “data anomalies arising from one country” in the “underlying GDP dataset, Uzbekistan, substantially bias their predicted impacts of climate change.” When the Uzbekistan data was removed and statistical uncertainty corrected for, the results were no longer “statistically distinguishable from mitigation costs at any time this century.”

In other words, the economic harm from climate change no longer exceeded the costs of the gov’t interventions to do something to arrest warming temperatures.

The study had so many errors Nature has now retracted it, but what an embarrassment. The retraction is also a black eye for the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), a group of central banks and financial regulators that incorporated the study’s projections into its bank climate stress test scenarios. The Federal Reserve belonged to the network until Chair Jerome Powell withdrew in Jan.

One question is why the study’s glaring errors weren’t caught by peer reviewers. One culprit might be conformity bias, as reviewers didn’t want to deny findings that support the narrative that humanity is killing the planet and the entire world economy must be rearranged to prevent it.

Our Note: The Board calls out Axios as one of the more compliant news outlets when it comes to hyping the negative effects of climate change. So it’s notable that the WSJ news arm—which, sadly, drifts more politically left by the day with the apparent blessing of owner Dow Jones—has just hired as it’s Deputy Editor in Chief Aja Whitaker-Moore, Editor in Chief of Axios.