Over tens and hundreds of thousands of years there have been many periodic climate crises – some of them literally threatening the destruction of humanity – but none of them due to human activity. We know that there was a climate change so rapid and dramatic about 62,000 years ago, that nothing grandparents could teach their grandchildren would be helpful. That’s a crisis.
Here is a recent nonsense study, now retracted.
A much-hyped study in the journal Nature turns out to have been full of errors.
One scandal of our age is the attempt to sell the public on the narrative of climate catastrophe. It’s been fed by the press and overheated political and scientific claims that sometimes are phony. That’s the story with the journal Nature’s retraction of a highly publicized climate study that made headlines.
The study was a shocker when it was first published in April 2024. Scientists at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research projected that climate change could cause $38 trillion in economic damage a year by 2049. To put that number in perspective, the GDP of North America last year was about $31.4 trillion. The study’s finding would mean that storms, heat waves and other calamities, supposedly caused by climate change, would wipe out the equivalent of the North American economy, and then some, every year.
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The study had so many errors that Nature has now retracted it, but what an embarrassment. “Post-publication, the results were found to be sensitive to the removal of one country, Uzbekistan, where inaccuracies were noted in the underlying economic data for the period 1995–1999,” the retraction says.
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One question is why the study’s glaring errors weren’t caught by peer reviewers before it was published. One culprit might be conformity bias, as reviewers didn’t want to gainsay findings that support the narrative that humanity is killing the planet and the entire world economy must be rearranged to prevent it. When politics is in the saddle, the chances of bad science increase.
If progressives want to know why so many Americans don’t believe claims of the climate apocalypse, it’s because so much of climate science has been shown to be unbelievable.
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