Turns Out Major Climate Study Peddled By Media Relied On Bunk Data

A 2024 climate change study amplified by the corporate press projecting up to $38 trillion in global climate damages by 2050 relied on inaccurate data, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

The study’s inclusion of Uzbekistan’s faulty GDP figures skewed its results and cast doubt on its conclusion that global GDP could be roughly 62% lower by 2100 due to climate change than it otherwise would be, according to the Post. Numerous prominent media outlets touted the study upon its release as proof of climate change’s imminent economic threat, but a new analysis and experts who spoke to the Post argue the paper is undermined by Uzbekistan’s “data anomalies.”

The original study was the second-most cited paper across media in 2024, according to the U.K.-based climate outlet Carbon Brief.

“The only GDP that is set to plummet is the GDP of fraudulent self-promoting climate activists who are about to finally and appropriately get their funding cut by the Trump administration,” President of the Heartland Institute James Taylor told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Common sense and actual peer-reviewed studies show that warmer weather saves lives, with nearly 20 times more people dying from cold than heat, that warmer temperatures and more atmospheric CO2 are stimulating a blooming of greenery throughout the planet, and crop production sets records nearly every year with longer growing seasons and more atmospheric CO2.” 

The U.S. government has even cited the study, with one December 2024 Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report referencing it to illustrate the risks climate change poses to the American economy.

Once Uzbekistan was removed from the dataset, projected GDP losses dropped sharply, from 62% to 23% by 2100, and from 19% to 6% by 2050, Hsiang told the Post. Hsiang and his two co-authors, graduate students Tom Bearpark and Dylan Hogan, reportedly uncovered the error after erasing one nation at a time from the data collection and observing that Uzbekistan’s absence drastically shifted the results, according to the Post. The authors found that Uzbekistan’s GDP records showed wild oscillations incongruent with purportedly more reliable World Bank data, which reflected less intense fluctuations, according to the outlet.

“Everybody who works with data has some responsibility to look at the data and make sure it’s fit for purpose,” Global Policy Laboratory Director at Stanford University Solomon Hsiang, who helped point out the error, told the Post. “When you have a lot of data points, the idea that a small country could be so influential is not intuitive.”

Nature editor Karl Ziemelis wrote to the Post that his publication is reviewing the study and that “appropriate editorial action would be taken once the matter was resolved.” The report’s original authors told the outlet that the Uzbekistan data flub was a processing error that was corrected in an updated analysis, though they believe the report still holds up.

“We are grateful, and I think it’s a good part of the scientific process that they’ve pointed out these issues,” Leonie Wenz, professor of environmental economics at the Technical University of Berlin and one author of the initial study, told the Post. “But importantly, the main conclusions of the paper hold, and there are only slight changes to the estimates.”

The massive GDP loss scale was flagged during the peer review process, one review noting that “I find all of this well explained and fairly convincing, yet, purely subjectively, I have a hard time in believing the results, which seem unintuitively large given damages aren’t perfectly persistent.”

Nature, Wenz, his coauthors Maximilian Kotz and Anders Levermann, Hsiang, Bearpark and Hogan did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.