By Kevin Killough
When a peer-reviewed study last year concluded that the burning of fossil fuels was going to make the world $38 trillion poorer over the next century, journalists across multiple outlets reported on its findings. Even though the peer-review file showed that some of the reviewers had concerns about the study’s conclusions, many climate journalists didn’t question the study’s findings and conclusion.
In the months after its publication, as Just the News reported in August, the study, which was written by researchers at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, was found to have profound flaws. Only The Washington Post had reported on these at the time Just the News covered the controversy. On Wednesday, the authors retracted the study.
The impacts of flawed climate research that gets widely circulated can go beyond the walls of academia into the realm of policymaking. The now-retracted study has been cited by organizations influencing policy around the globe, including the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the U.S. Congressional Budget Office. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., cited the study last year and again in July — both times entering it into the Congressional Record.
Apocalyptic portrayals
When it was published, the study received widespread attention through the legacy media.
“Climate change will make you poorer,” CNN warned.
The Guardian reported on the study under the headline, “Climate crisis: average world incomes to diminish by nearly a fifth by 2050.”
Reuters and Forbes also posted articles on the study, and the Associated Press reported that “New study calculates climate change’s economic bite will hit about $38 trillion a year by 2049.” According to the activist publication Carbon Brief, only one other study received more mentions in the media in 2024.
A couple outlets that originally reported on its findings have covered its retraction. Rather than question the conclusion that using energy from fossil fuels is economically harmful, however, the reporters covering the retraction are claiming, despite the paper’s flaws, that the conclusion still has merits.
The article in the New York Times on the retraction ran under the sub-headline “While growing evidence shows that carbon emissions are harming the economy, the journal Nature found that an outlier paper had deep flaws.”
To support the claim that carbon emissions are harming the economy, the Times reporter refers to a study published in the scientific journal IOPscience that concluded up to a 40% loss in GDP by 2100 as a result of carbon dioxide emissions.
That figure is based on an emissions scenario called RCP8.5, which is widely recognized as implausible.
Roger Pielke, a political scientist and fellow at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, explains on his “The Honest Broker” Substack that the scenario is often used in climate research but leads to “apocalyptic portrayals of future climate change and providing an unreliable basis for policy analyses for adaptation and mitigation.”
The Potsdam study also relied on RCP8.5 in its analysis.
Maintaining narratives
The Associated Press covered the retraction, but the report focuses on the authors’ new analysis, which is not yet peer-reviewed. Only halfway down the article does the news agency’s reporter mention the retraction.
The reporter quotes one of the study’s authors arguing that the study’s conclusion that “climate change will be enormously damaging to the world economy if unchecked” still has merits.
In their new analysis, the authors find that the errors only lead the original paper to “slightly overstate” the drop in income over the next 25 years. In the original paper, the authors predicted that there would be a 99% chance that by 2050, fixing the damage from climate change would cost more than reducing emissions. The new analysis claims it’s now a 91% chance.
‘Complete fairy tale’
Historic data shows consistently that nations see rising standards of living as fossil fuel consumption increases. The United States increased its fossil fuel consumption from 13,800 terawatt-hours in 1965 to 21,200 terawatt hours in 2024.
A terawatt-hour is 1 trillion watt-hours. A 100-watt light bulb running for 1 hour consumes 100 watt-hours.
In that time period, U.S. GDP rose from $3.4 trillion to $22.7 trillion. The correlation is seen in developing countries, only more dramatically. In 1965, China consumed 1,471 terawatt hours of fossil fuel energy. By 2024, that had increased to 38,900 terawatt hours. In that time period, China’s GDP increased from $161 billion to $18.5 trillion.
Wielicki said climate research into the economic impacts of fossil fuels rarely considers the benefits that come from affordable, reliable energy that oil, gas and coal produce. In what he calls a “confirmation bias,” the researchers calculate only the cost of negatives.
“There’s always trade-offs, but to pretend that you could just erase the fossil fuels off the map and somehow the economy would keep functioning, it’s a complete fairy tale,” he said.
Antithetical to science
While the authors continue to maintain in the new analysis that their research has merits, other researchers disagree. Pielke called the study’s flaws “devastating” to its conclusions.
Another analysis, by Greg Hopper, senior fellow of the Bank Policy Institute, also found “no basis” for the study’s projections. A third analysis published in Nature in August concluded that the study’s results are “statistically insignificant when properly corrected,” and it doesn’t provide “robust empirical evidence needed to inform climate policy.”
As with Pielke, Hopper was also critical of the authors performing updated analyses. “Science doesn’t work by changing the setup of an experiment to get the answer you want. This approach is antithetical to science,” he wrote.
While this paper received enough criticism to lead to a retraction, plenty of other studies with flawed methods – including the use of RCP8.5 – continue to get published and promoted in the media. Were it not for the authors’ decision to retract it, few would have known there were any questions about its conclusions.
