The paper prompted a wave of apocalyptic headlines in mainstream media outlets.
Leading scientific journal Nature has retracted a 2024 study published that predicted climate change would wreak havoc on the global economy, prompting apocalyptic headlines from mainstream media outlets.
“The Economic Commitment of Climate Change,” authored by researchers associated with Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, found that climate change would reduce global income by 19 percent over the next 25 years relative to a baseline in which global temperatures remained static. The paper also predicted that global economic output would decline by 62 percent by 2100. While previous studies had predicted climate change would have a negative effect on the global economy, the German study was novel in the degree of economic damage forecasted.
The researchers behind the study also predicted that the damage the global economy will incur over the next 25 years due to climate change will be six times greater than the cost of lowering emissions to the point that temperatures rise no more than 2 degrees celsius, a finding that makes the economic cost associated with transitioning to green energy seem low compared to the cost of letting climate change take its course.
On Wednesday, Nature retracted the paper, due to inaccuracies around the data set used for Uzbekistan. When researches excluded Uzbekistan from the analysis, they found that their initial prediction of a 62 percent decline in global economic output by 2100 is reduced to a 23 percent decline, a finding that more closely resembles previous studies.
Due to the substantial nature of the findings, the study’s authors retracted the paper instead of correcting it. They plan to resubmit a revised version.
“Most people for the last decade have thought that a 20 percent reduction in 2100 was an insanely large number,” Solomon Hsiang, a professor of global environmental policy at Stanford University, and the author of a critique of the study said. “So the fact that this paper is coming out saying 60 percent is off the chart.”
The retraction comes after Hsiang and others questioned the study’s methodology this summer.
Associated Press, Reuters, Forbes, Bloomberg, Axios, and Voice of America, among other outlets, covered the study when it was released. National Review has reached out to each of the outlets to ask whether they will revise the articles. In response, AP pointed to a follow-up article the news wire published on Wednesday, “Researchers slightly lower study’s estimate of drop in global income due to climate change.”
The Network for Greening the Financial System, which is a network of central banks and financial supervisors, also cited the report in a guide it used to assess climate-related financial risks and opportunities.
The NGFS has added a recent notice on its guide that “users should be aware of the retraction of the Kotz et al. (2024) paper when interpreting and applying Phase V results, alongside the broader limitations of physical risk estimates already detailed in NGFS documentation.”
Banks like JP Morgan used the NGFS’s climate scenarios to analyze internal risk management processes, to “identify, measure, monitor and manage climate-related financial risks,” according to JP Morgan’s 2024 Sustainability Report.
The study was the second most referenced climate paper in 2024, according to Carbon Brief.