A widely-referenced 2024 study that predicted massive global economic damages due to climate change has now been retracted, The New York Times (NYT) reported on Wednesday.
Nature, widely considered to be a prestigious scientific journal, published an article titled “The economic commitment of climate change” in April 2024, which detailed how global gross domestic product (GDP) could be roughly 62% lower by 2100 due to climate change. The journal’s decision to retract the study on Wednesday came after some economists’ discovery that data issues in one country, Uzbekistan, had heavily distorted the results, according to the NYT.
When the team of economists recalculated the results excluding Uzbekistan, the projected climate change damages were similar to previous research, and showed that instead of a projected 62% decrease in global economic output by 2100 due to continuing carbon emissions, global GDP would actually have a 23% reduction, the NYT reported.
When reached for comment, Nature referred the Daily Caller News Foundation to its retraction notice from Wednesday.
A variety of news outlets previously reported on Nature’s now-retracted study. As of Wednesday, the study has notably been accessed more than 300,000 times, as well as being cited 226 times, according to its article metrics on Nature’s website.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) also mentioned the study in a December 2024 report highlighting the “risks” of climate change to the U.S.
Moreover, the study has also been previously cited by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and was listed in the top 5% of journal articles tracked by Altmetric, a tool that tracks the attention that research outputs, the NYT reported. Similarly, the U.K.-based climate outlet Carbon Brief reported in January that the original study was the second most referenced climate paper in 2024.
Additionally, Americans in major cities no longer view climate change as a top issue, according to an American Communities Project/Ipsos poll released in November.
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