The global warming crisis blob is eager to bullhorn any scrap of “science” to scare the industrial West into surrendering to its agenda. But it turns out that when a much-touted report was slain by error, then the metaphorical crickets, not the ones the elites want us to eat to save the environment, are all that can be heard.

A paper published in the science journal Nature in April 2024 was retracted this week by its authors because “the results were found to be sensitive to the removal of one country, Uzbekistan, where inaccuracies were noted in the underlying economic data for the period 1995–1999.”

The authors fixed the data, but they “acknowledge that these changes are too substantial for a correction, leading to the retraction of the paper.”

“The Economic Commitment of Climate Change” wasn’t merely “a fatally flawed paper,” says Roger Pielke Jr., environmental studies professor, “but a flawed paper that had taken on outsized influence in climate advocacy and policy.” 

The authors predicted that climate change would cost $38 trillion a year by 2049, estimating “that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years, regardless of how rapidly humanity now cuts emissions,” says Carbon Brief. As is expected, they also warned “that climate change is likely to exacerbate existing inequalities,” so that policymakers could cite the paper to support their wealth redistribution schemes.

The authors further claimed to see clearly enough into the future to project “the global gross domestic product would be lowered by 62% by 2100.” That’s three times larger than the decline found in similar previous forecasts.

None of the three researchers who authored the paper was an economist, yet they made an economic forecast, and a dramatic one, at that. But then science has been corrupted by a braying mob of leftists, which has turned what should be calm, rational, defensible forecasts into a politically driven scrap yard of pseudo-scientific rubbish.

Of course, the media were all in. The paper was picked up by 542 news outlets and is referenced in 11 Wikipedia pages. It was ranked No. 2 among climate papers in 2024 for “social and media attention.” The article has been accessed on the Nature site more than 300,000 times and cited 226 times.

Outside the media attention, Pielke says the study was used to “justify projections of catastrophic future climate impacts and as a basis for cost-benefit analyses of mitigation” by the Congressional Budget Office, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Bank, and the British Office of Budget Responsibility.

It was also adopted by a “consortium comprised primarily of central banks around the world … as the basis for its ‘damage function’ used by bank regulators to stress test monetary policies against climate risks.”

And it was wrong, and every news outlet that used it to stir up fear and activate the warming loons should cover the retraction as comprehensively as they did the paper when it was released. It’s their journalistic duty.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board