Fox Business – The Bottom Line – Broadcast December 4, 2025
Morano: “This is a huge adjustment. The authors of the paper said they couldn’t actually make any corrections that they could justify. They had to do a full retraction. They were offered the opportunity to just do a correction and try to slide it under the radar, and there was no way because the errors were so big.
The Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein claimed it was just a tiny — nothing to see here– retraction. First off, the Associated Press receives, I think, $8 million from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation. Rockefeller has pledged to spend like a billion dollars promoting climate change. The AP is bought and paid for by these climate advocacy groups.
The media is cheerleading and campaigning for the climate change industry. The second thing is they’re is a general consensus among the climate activist media that ‘of course, climate change is going to be bad. Who cares what the actual number is going to be? As long as we know it’s bad, it doesn’t matter.’
The bottom line is, this retracted study used extreme modeling scenarios. It defies all logic, because as the temperature of the Earth has been warm since the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850, we’ve had massive economic growth and improved human prosperity. You can just look at the US. Since the first Earth Day, when they had all these dire predictions, we’ve increased our growth dramatically and improved the environment. These modeling-based economic numbers of dire climate impacts are nonsense to begin with.
There’s actually been an increase in these scientific retractions. A few years ago, there was a study claiming that lizards, yes, the animal lizard, would be getting hotter faster than the rest of the planet, and that study had to be retracted. Another study in the scientific realm was a scientist who made up over 20 emails and invented 20 people and did reviews of his own paper. That study had to be pulled and retracted. There’s a whole website called Retraction Watch that keeps on top of this.
This is scientists behaving badly. Even if this paper had not been retracted, it was attacked immediately when it was released as having ridiculous assumptions and data. It uses this thing called RCP8.5, which is an extreme modeling scenario. Are you ready for this? It was invented and funded by billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg. They actually had a meeting back in 2012 to say, how do we make climate change feel more immediate? And they started this idea of these extreme model scenarios.
And that’s what this paper that was retracted relied on. When current reality fails to alarm, you make scarier and scarier predictions of the future. So it’s nice to see this paper retracted, because they have egg all over their face, notwithstanding the AP’s attempt to paper over this shoddy scientific work.
Anchor Question: So the real estate marketplace Zillow is finally ending its bowing to the climate mob quietly, removing its climate risk scores from home listings, after years of the scores being used to manipulate market values.
Morano: Well, this was sort of like the ESG score (Environment, Social Governance) where you remember, in Sri Lanka, they had one of the highest ESG scores in the world. And of course they went all green, and then the country collapsed, and the presidential palace was overrun. The same thing here, Zillow’s climate risk score is just a number without any real reason or logical science behind it.
Zillow was issuing high climate data risk assessment properties, claiming they were going to flood and other extreme weather. When these properties weren’t in FEMA flood zones, had never flooded, and homeowners were losing hundreds of thousands — sometimes more in value — because of these ridiculous risk numbers being associated. This is Silicon Valley trying to impose a climate agenda. Who knows maybe they wanted to the properties to tank the property values so that equity asset firms could go in and buy up the homes cheaper.
Zillow is looking for the clicks. There’s a lot of competition. It is a great service the way it works, and it gives you the history of home sales and all that. The problem is when they got involved in this by issuing this climate risk data. They’re playing into the climate agenda, and B, it’s fake data. It’s based on these potential climate model, scary scenarios of the future. None of which ever pan out, and they just keep making these predictions, and it turns into a big financial hit that’s impacting real homeowners. There have been a flurry of pushback in the last 4 months, and this is actually a good outcome because Zillow is responding to public pressure. It’s still not gone, so it still could come back, but we have to kill this dead.
Fox anchor: Marc, thank you so much for joining us.
NYT: Top Journal Retracts Study Predicting Catastrophic Climate Toll
AP’s Seth Borenstein downplays retraction of study he touted: ‘Tiny change but salient to note’
Excerpt: The Associated Press received $8 million from climate advocacy groups in 2022 directly in support of its climate and energy reporting. These political advocacy groups include the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Quadrivium and the Rockefeller Foundation, which has pledged over $1 billion between 2023 and 2028 to eliminate the use of fossil fuels.
Excerpt: According to the New York Times, in November 2012, one month after stepping down from the hedge fund he led, Steyer gathered environmental leaders and Democratic party leaders around the kitchen table at his ranch in Pescadero, California. Among those in attendance were Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, and John Podesta, who had founded the Center for American Progress (CAP) in 2003 to promote progressive causes. (Another disclosure: In 2014, Steyer funded a successful campaign by CAP to have me removed as a writer for 538, as revealed in the Wikileaks Podesta emails.)
At the kitchen table meeting, Steyer was focused on the question: “How do you make climate change feel real and immediate for people?” He was convinced by attendees that the best way to answer this question was through people’s pocketbooks, through economics.
Following this meeting, Steyer invited two collaborators and co-funders to join him, to give the appearance of being non-partisan. One was Michael Bloomberg, then a political independent who was completing 12 years as the mayor of New York. The other was Hank Paulson, a Republican who was a former CEO of Goldman Sachs and who had also served as Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush.
Each of Steyer, Bloomberg and Paulson contributed $500,000 to the initial project, which was focused on “making the climate threat feel real, immediate and potentially devastating to the business world.” The initial aim was to produce a series of reports, drawing on several young academics and the expertise of external consultants at the Rhodium Group and Risk Management Solutions.
The first report was published in June, 2014 and was titled “Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States.” The Risky Business approach was a smart if flawed way to place economics at the center of climate policy. The approach focused on characterizing the extreme RCP8.5 scenario as “the closest to a business-as-usual trajectory” and centered its economic analysis on that scenario: “we focus on RCP 8.5 as the pathway closest to a future without concerted action to reduce future warming.” In this way they guaranteed that the economic impacts would be eye-poppingly large.
But in generating large economic impacts, the approach of the Risky Business report made two significant methodological mistakes.
Retractions of Scientific Papers Are Skyrocketing
‘Retractions of scientific papers have surged in recent years’
