Roger Pielke writes about the faulty research behind climate alarmism.
The scientific journal Nature in December retracted one of the most influential climate economics papers of the past decade. The paper, by Maximilian Kotz, Anders Levermann and Leonie Wenz, claimed that unmitigated climate change would cost the global economy $38 trillion a year (in 2005 international dollars) by midcentury. It was the second-most-mentioned climate paper by the media in 2024, according to Carbon Brief. The paper was cited by central banks and governments to justify aggressive climate policies.
Then it collapsed. The authors acknowledged that its errors were “too substantial” for a correction. Nature retracted the paper more than 18 months after first learning of its problems.
Most media coverage treated this as an unfortunate aberration in what is otherwise settled science. The retraction, however, isn’t a one-off. It revealed a crack that runs much deeper into the foundation of climate research.
Economists Finbar Curtin and Matthew Burgess at the University of Wyoming released a preprint on April 20 that points out the broader flaws with current climate change research, making the Kotz et al. retraction look like small potatoes. Their paper, “The Empirically Inscrutable Climate-Economy Relationship,” starts from the most basic question in climate economics: Can researchers actually measure how climate affects the economy from the historical record?
Their answer is no. That matters enormously, because over the past decade, the field of climate economics has generated some of the most consequential numbers in global finance and governance. Central banks around the world have restructured their risk frameworks around these findings. The Network for Greening the Financial System—a coalition of more than 130 central banks and supervisors, including the European Central Bank and the Bank of England—built its climate scenario guidance on climate economics research. Federal agencies in the U.S., especially under the Obama and Biden presidencies, estimate the “social cost of carbon” when assessing the costs and benefits of proposed environmental policies. This framework has shaped regulations governing appliance standards, pipeline permitting and vehicle emissions.
