Retracted climate study sparks calls for policy rollbacks and skeptical journalism
Of all of the lightning-rod topics, climate change is up there with abortion, guns and immigration in its conductivity for divisiveness. In 2024, one of the world’s top environmental journals published a study predicting $38 trillion in global yearly economic activity would be erased if humans didn’t change course on climate policies before 2050. It quickly became ubiquitous.
More than a year later, it has been retracted.
The study’s authors are revising their data in a follow-up study currently under peer review. It is still likely to join other research in showing that climate-related changes will produce a significant drop in economic activity, but less than the highly influential paper originally stated.
Despite the scientific community seeing retractions as evidence of due diligence, climate change skeptics are calling for rollbacks of policies that were based on the faulty data. News of such a significant retraction could also serve as a reminder to journalists of their role in looking critically at information that appears extraordinary, a mass media professor posits.
The study
Researchers at Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany published their study in the journal Nature on April 17, 2024. It projected a loss of 19% in global income by 2050 due to the effects of climate change. By 2100, the paper estimated, climate change would constrict the world’s gross domestic product by 63%. Other papers on the topic had previously estimated a 23% decrease in global economic activity by then.
For context, the National Institutes of Health estimate that the COVID-19 pandemic shrank global GDP by 3% in 2020.
The researchers predicted with 99% certainty that it would cost more to reverse the effects of climate change than it would to build resilience by 2050.
Cited far and wide
The research quickly became one of Nature’s most cited papers. As of last Friday, the journal’s metrics show it was cited 226 times, reported on in 542 news articles, and viewed hundreds of thousands of times more.
News outlets worldwide reported on the findings in the days and weeks following publication. Headlines like The Associated Press’ “New study calculates climate change’s economic bite will hit about $38 trillion a year by 2049” and Forbes’ “New Study: Climate Change Could Reduce The World Economy 19% By 2049” were commonplace.
The AP, The New York Times, Axios and others have now reported on Nature’s retraction.
From a policy standpoint, the research was cited by several government entities to highlight the calamitous economic effects of climate change.
The Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), a group that works parallel with the OECD to advise world banks and other financial firms on climate-related financial risks and opportunities, used the 2024 research as a new risk management model to inform its member central banks on how to plan for climate change. The group issued a note this week acknowledging the retraction.
The Congressional Budget Office used the research in its December 2024 analysis on the economic impact of climate change.
What happened?
The researchers used 40 years of data from more than 1,600 regions worldwide to predict economic losses due to climate change. That included records from Uzbekistan that later fell under scrutiny.
Researchers who had conducted similar studies keyed in on data from the former Soviet Bloc country in central Asia. They noted in their published critiques that removing the small country’s data reverted the study’s results to lack any statistical significance.
“When Uzbekistan’s data are removed, and statistical uncertainty is corrected to account for spatial correlations, (the study’s) central estimate aligns closely with previous literature and their results are no longer statistically distinguishable from mitigation costs at any time this century,” the review reads.
The fallout
Beyond climate change skeptics crowing about how the retraction proves their theories that climate change is a sham, others in public service are calling for a review of policies based on the paper.
“Oregon built its policies on a study that just got retracted,” Oregon Rep. Dwayne Yunker, R-Grant’s Pass, said in a post to X on Dec. 4. He asked whether his governor or Democratic leaders would admit the mistake and change course.
On the other side of the world, opposition party leaders in Australia are demanding the country review its climate goals that would reduce carbon emissions there by up to 70% by 2035. According to The Australian, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese accepted those plans that, in part, used data from the retracted paper.
Keeping the public’s trust
Retractions in scientific research are rare but becoming less so. According to Retraction Watch, Nature has retracted 32 papers since 2020. The journal pulled three in 2024. The Dec. 3 climate change retraction was the sixth for Nature this year.
By and large, the peer review process that can lead to corrections and rare retractions is seen as a good thing by the scientific community.
“Some retracted papers are fraudulent, but most aren’t. Instead, most retracted papers contain errors that neither the authors nor the peer reviewers were aware of,” Ed Maibach, founding director of the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, told SAN. “When those errors come to light, authors are generally quick to retract their paper because they don’t want to publish erroneous claims. Journal editors, too.”
As with any human endeavor, Maibach said, sometimes people make mistakes.
“As scientists, we’re trained to welcome evidence that we got it wrong, so we can consider it and improve our work in the future if the evidence is convincing,” he said. “Not all scientists act that way, but most do, and it is undoubtedly the ethic we are trained to respect.”
He stresses that climate scientists are typically conservative with their estimates, citing the retracted report as a reason why.
“The recent retraction from Nature doesn’t change much in terms of the balance of evidence showing that climate change is likely to reduce the world’s economic productivity,” he said.
Journalists, however, carry a responsibility to be inherently skeptical about anything that crosses their desk. Craig Allen, a longtime former news director and professor at Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said abstract topics like climate change are tough for reporters to verify.
“When I was in the newsroom and teaching students, it’s immediate events, daily news and that kind of thing,” he told SAN. “It’s very difficult for a newsroom to delve into complex things like global warming.”
He said climate change predictions have rarely fallen under the traditional journalistic scrutiny.
“What matters here is enabling informed public opinion sufficiently to promote correct policies on climate change so that leaders make informed decisions,” he said. “I don’t see any element in the news media that’s willing to stop that, to counter the shock stories of global warming.”
Allen said situations like reports on the now-retracted paper add to the growing public distrust in journalism.
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
