A much-hyped Nature journal climate study is full of huge errors.
Dear climate change fearmongers, please note A Climate Study Retraction for the Ages
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 sometimes are phony. That’s the story with the journal Nature’s retraction of a highly publicized climate study that made headlines.
The study was a shocker when it was first published in April 2024. Scientists at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research projected that climate change could cause $38 trillion in economic damage a year by 2049. To put that number in perspective, the GDP of North America last year was about $31.4 trillion. The study’s finding would mean that storms, heat waves and other calamities, supposedly caused by climate change, would wipe out the equivalent of the North American economy, and then some, every year.
The study also forecast that 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.
In July 2024, Nature issued a correction noting that rows of data were “wrongly printed as a decimal, rather than a percentage point.”
Other scientists wrote in a comment to Nature—akin to a newspaper letter to the editor—that the study “underestimates uncertainty . . . rendering their results statistically insignificant when properly corrected.”
Still other scientists in August noted in a comment 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 government interventions to do something to arrest warming temperatures.
The study had so many errors that Nature has now retracted it, but what an embarrassment. “Post-publication, 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 retraction says.
If progressives want to know why so many Americans don’t believe claims of the climate apocalypse, it’s because so much of climate science has been shown to be unbelievable.
AOC Says World Will End in 12 Years
On January 22, 2019 I noted Ocasio-Cortez Says World Will End in 12 Years: Here’s What to Do About It
The world is now slated to end on January 22, 2031.
You only have about 5 years left to live. Please make the best of them.
Scientists Conclude Dire Climate Change Models Were Wrong, Now What?
On February 6, 2022, I asked Scientists Conclude Dire Climate Change Models Were Wrong, Now What?
“We have a situation where the models are behaving strangely,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences, a leading center for climate modeling. “We have a conundrum.”
In an independent assessment of 39 global-climate models last year, scientists found that 13 of the new models produced significantly higher estimates of the global temperatures caused by rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide than the older computer models—scientists called them the “wolf pack.” Weighed against historical evidence of temperature changes, those estimates were deemed unrealistic.
Even the simplest diagnostic test is challenging. The model divides Earth into a virtual grid of 64,800 cubes, each 100 kilometers on a side, stacked in 72 layers. For each projection, the computer must calculate 4.6 million data points every 30 minutes. To test an upgrade or correction, researchers typically let the model run for 300 years of simulated computer time.
In their initial analysis, scientists discovered a flaw in how CESM2 modeled the way moisture interacts with soot, dust or sea-spray particles that allow water vapor to condense into cloud droplets. It took a team of 10 climate experts almost 5 months to track it down to a flaw in their data and correct it, the scientists said.
AOC’s Green New Deal Pricetag of $51 to $93 Trillion
On February 25, 2019 I noted I compared AOC’s Green New Deal Pricetag of $51 to $93 Trillion vs. Cost of Doing Nothing
William Nordhaus, a co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics, compared AOC’s Green New Deal with the cost of doing nothing and various alternatives.
Nordhaus’s model estimated that such a policy goal would make humanity $14 trillion poorer compared to doing nothing at all about climate change.
Climate Policy Is a Much Greater Threat Than Climate Change
On September 11, 2022 I stated Climate Policy Is a Much Greater Threat Than Climate Change
Germany’s decision to scrap its nuclear reactors before having replacement energy is in play.
In April, then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson bragged his Energy Security Strategy would “bring clean, affordable, secure power to the people for generations to come.”
In the US, California marches on with the blessing of president Biden, preposterous targets for electric cars without having the faintest idea where the minerals and mining for those batteries will come from.
Policy decisions by clueless heads of state bow down to Saint Gretta, AOC, and president Biden.
What needs to be stress tested is the reverse, the inflationary impact of a push for clean energy before battery storage technology exists, grid improvements exist, and whether or not physical metals for all the batteries that will be needed are even available.
The Best Video On Climate Change That You Will Ever See
On January 15, 2023 I asked you to play The Best Video On Climate Change That You Will Ever See
The link still works.
COP30 Failure
The COP30 climate summit this year ended in total failure.
But there was a hilarious aspect to the summit. They Held a Climate Summit in the Amazon. They Didn’t Account for the Rain.
The first day of talks at the two-week conference, known as COP30, was marked by a deluge so huge it caught the organizers by surprise.
The delegation from the U.K. fled their pavilion, abandoning coffee and snacks after a hole appeared in the tent roof, lightning crackling in the sky.
Elsewhere, leaks in the vast canopy, some 77 football fields in size, meant water was seeping through vents in the air conditioning or dripping onto the delegates who had come to negotiate what to do about climate change.
The Italian delegation built a floating stage to sit on the river which surrounds Belém, delivered from Venice. It appeared well-adapted, at first. It was designed to flow with the river and was open to the elements. But on the Italians’ opening night, the torrents of rain short-circuited TV monitors and panelists struggled to give their presentations.
In one wing, where the Global Renewables Alliance had a stand, there wasn’t any air conditioning. Two people in the area fainted as thermometers showed the temperature hitting 97 degrees.
Yet other parts of the site were positively frigid. Some sections developed their own microclimates due to the flow of air conditioning, forcing delegates to rummage around for jackets to keep warm.
Other issues have plagued the conference. Some stalls weren’t ready on the first day of the conference, on Nov. 10. Toilets lacked basic items such as soap, while water gushing from the faucets was tinged brown.
If you think that would spur action for change, you are mistaken.
COP30 Failure
Earth.Org: The biggest failure of COP30, many agree, is that the final agreement omits any mention of planet-warming fossil fuels. It comes despite an unprecedented number of countries (more than 80 and led by Colombia) and more than 100 organizations, explicitly asked the presidency to develop a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels. Under pressure from major petrostates, including Saudi Arabia and Russia, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago ultimately announced a compromise: a voluntary “roadmap” for transitioning away from fossil fuels.
Yale Climate Connections: Those who hoped for significant, concrete progress at this year’s United Nations Climate Conference of Parties, or COP30, in Belém, Brazil, were disappointed, for good reasons. Not least, the meeting’s final statement did not even mention the major role of fossil fuels in driving climate change, never mind addressing the critical, even existential, need to reduce their emissions.
RockyMountainOutlook: As one might expect, many are now carefully monitoring the aftershocks of what is now seen as an increasingly disastrous Convention of the Parties at the UN Climate Summit in Brazil. After the close of COP 30, the Director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health posited that the damage that was done by way of the failure of COP 30 was far more devastating than we had even feared. We have now seen that Prime Minister Mark Carney has clearly learned from Trump how to “flood the zone.” The prime minister has announced the “big, beautiful bargain” he promised to deliver as détente at last with Alberta. It proposes making Canada a “global energy superpower” by building new pipelines, expanding LNG exports and promoting industrial carbon capture. Rolled into this, apparently, is the “big beautiful bargain” the prime minister promised to cut with climate change. It is a tightrope act. Until emissions have ceased, talk of reversal of their impacts is like contemplating the restoration of a river delta despoiled by an oil spill while the leak is still spewing from the tanker and nothing can be done to slow it.
China Turns Focus of COP30 to Trade
- Championing Green Trade: Chinese officials and companies, including battery giant CATL and EV maker BYD, highlighted how Chinese-made, low-cost clean energy products can accelerate the global energy transition, especially in the Global South.
- Opposing Trade Barriers: China used the negotiations to advocate for an open international economic system and secure language in the final agreement, the “Global Mutirão decision,” which cautioned against “unilateral” climate measures that could restrict international trade.
- Filling a Leadership Void: With the US administration absent from the talks, China took on a more prominent, albeit low-profile, diplomatic role. Its focus was less on high-level pledges and more on practical business deals and shaping the agenda to favor its export economy.
- Formal Trade Dialogue: A significant outcome was the agreement to hold annual dialogues on the intersection of trade and climate action for the first time in the COP process, a key ask from China and other developing nations.
- Ultimately, while the primary aim of COP30 was climate action, China successfully integrated its trade agenda into the core discussions, ensuring that trade policy became a key component of the conversation on global climate solutions.
The above from Chrome AI in response to my query “China managed to turn COP30 from a summit on climate to a summit on trade.”
Why the Failure?
For starters, failure is in the eyes of the beholder.
I suggest COP30 was a rousing success. No country can afford what the climate fearmongers are asking the world to pay. Even the EU is delaying its climate agenda.
The Al Gore, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, Gretta, Gavin Newsom, etc., members of the climate bandwagon sit in their comfortable air-conditioned ivory towers, and jet-set around the world preaching more money for climate change when others are looking for their next affordable meal.
WSJ Today: If progressives want to know why so many Americans don’t believe claims of the climate apocalypse, it’s because so much of climate science has been shown to be unbelievable.
Mish February 6, 2022: Anyone expecting government fearmongers to do anything sensible about climate change were, and still are wrong.
Believe what you want. But people are concerned about putting food on the table, spiraling electricity costs, and truly out of sight homeowners’ insurance costs.
Sensible people are pleased the summit got rained on and ended in failure.
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Those are the things people are concerned about, not hyped up unbelievable estimates of climate change damage.
