JASON ISAAC: Senator Whitehouse, Please Correct The Congressional Record

Every so often, a story perfectly captures the problem with the way climate “science” is sold to the public and policymakers. The recentWashington Post report on a deeply flawed, headline-grabbing climate economics study is one of those stories, with a twist. This study didn’t just make waves in the media; it made its way into the United StatesCongressional Record, courtesy of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

In 2024, Whitehouse took to the Senate floor with his “trusty battered ‘Time to Wake Up’ chart” to warn of trillions in climate damages. As one of his key pieces of evidence, he cited a study from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, published inNature, which claimed the world was on track to lose 19 percent of global GDP by 2050, and a staggering 62 percent by 2100.

There was just one problem: the science wasn’t just bad; it was absurd.

According to theWashington Post, a fresh analysis found the study’s projections rested almost entirely on faulty economic data from one country: Uzbekistan. In the dataset, Uzbekistan’s GDP supposedly plunged 90 percent in 2000 and then jumped 90 percent in 2010, with other wild swings in between, numbers the World Bank says bear little resemblance to reality.

Those errors drove the model’s catastrophic projections. Remove Uzbekistan, and the projected GDP loss in 2100 drops from 62 percent to 23 percent. For 2050, the damage falls from 19 percent to 6 percent, less than one-third of what Whitehouse read into the Congressional Record.

In other words, a country representing just 0.2 percent of global GDP, with wildly erroneous data, dictated the economic future of the planet, at least according to