By Jo Nova
What’s most interesting about this is that this paper was ever published at all, given how awful it was.
In April last year Nature released the Kotz study which said that climate change would cause a mind-blowingly shocking 62% reduction in economic output by 2,100AD. Now, we know it’s wrong because the climate models are useless, but it turned out that one outlier country singlehandedly trashed the world economic forecasts, and that was Uzbekistan. Instead of a 62% reduction, without Uzbekistan, the global drop was “only 23%”.
So much for “peer review” then? This paper’s conclusion was wildly worse than the consensus of doomer papers, but the peer reviewers didn’t figure out why its result was so skewed, so Nature, supposedly the most esteemed repository of science, published the outlier anyway.
Even the uber left The New York Times is saying they should have been more skeptical:
Top Journal Retracts Study Predicting Catastrophic Climate Toll
By Lydia DePillis, The New York Times
Of course, erasing more than 20 percent of the world’s economic activity would still be a devastating blow to human welfare. The paper’s detractors emphasize that climate change is a major threat, as recent meta analyses have found, and that more should be done to address it — but, they say, unusual results should be treated skeptically.
“Most people for the last decade have thought that a 20 percent reduction in 2100 was an insanely large number,” said Solomon Hsiang, a professor of global environmental policy at Stanford University who co-wrote the critique published in August. “So the fact that this paper is coming out saying 60 percent is off the chart.”
Naturally, the mistake helped The Blob, so almost no one with a job in the climate-alarm industry wanted to look for anything that might be overdone. This study was used to justify all kinds of economic decisions that otherwise make no sense. Ka-ching. Ka-ching.
It also led to a striking comparison with the costs of avoiding catastrophic warming. Damages that are essentially baked in over the next 25 years will cost six times the money it would take to lower emissions enough to limit the world to 2 degrees Celsius of warming, the goal set by the Paris Climate Accord.
This is emblematic of the whole field of climate research. Monopsonistic research always finds what the one sole customer (The Blob) pays it to find. Thus the government funded establishment loved it. Look how popular this junk-research was:
The paper was also cited by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and was in the top 5 percent of journal articles tracked by Altmetric, a measurement tool for research impact. Carbon Brief, a climate-focused news outlet, found it was the second most referenced climate paper in 2024.
Roger Pielke Jnr points out this was the second most featured climate paper in the media in 2024. “More importantly, [Kotz et al] has been widely used in policy around the world to justify projections of catastrophic future climate impacts and as a basis for cost-benefit analyses of mitigation.” It was used in places like the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, the OECD the World Bank and the UK Office for Budget Responsibility.
The Australian Climate Change Authority also cited the now-retracted Kotz et al. (2024) Nature paper in its official advice on Australia’s 2035 climate targets. They didn’t specifically quote any passages from it — but they used it as part of the “evidence base” to imply massive, climate damages that justify extremely high emissions-reduction targets.
Lint Barrage, chair of energy and climate economics at ETH Zurich (said) “It can feel sometimes, depending on the audience, that there’s an expectation of finding large estimates,” Ms. Barrage said. “If your goal is to try to make the case for climate change, you have crossed the line from scientist to activist, and why would the public trust you?”
So why has this been retracted now?
Is Nature sensing a change in the mood where this sort of weak “activist-science” looks terrible…? Could be.
The retraction might be just part of the escape plan. They’ve had their headlines of doom for 18 months already.
REFERENCES (that aren’t any more)
Kotz, M., Levermann, A., & Wenz, L. (2024). The economic commitment of climate change. Nature, 628(8008), 551–557. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07219-0”
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
h/t to Climate Depot