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Climate hucksters wrong again: Study claiming climate change would make you poorer retracted over major flaws
German climate alarmists claimed in a study published last year in the journal Nature that even if carbon dioxide emissions were radically cut down, so-called climate change would still drive the world economy toward a global GDP reduction of 19%. The alarmists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research suggested further that not only would global annual climate-change damages hit $38 trillion by 2049, but that under a high-emissions scenario, global GDP would be lowered around 60% relative to the baseline in 75 years — an impact reportedly three times larger than previous estimates.'Most people for the last decade have thought that a 20% reduction in 2100 was an insanely large number. So the fact that this paper is coming out saying 60% is off the chart.'According to the U.K.-based Carbon Brief, this was one of the most-cited climate papers by the media, including the Associated Press, CNN, Deutsche Welle, and Reuters.Just the News highlighted that numerous activists and institutions also cited it, including Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) and the World Bank.The problem for the climate alarmists and those who believed them was that the study's conclusions were bogus.A team of American economists pointed out in a commentary published by Nature in August that "data anomalies arising from one country in [the German researchers'] underlying GDP dataset, Uzbekistan, substantially bias their predicted impacts of climate change." The economists revealed that if the questionable data pertaining to Uzbekistan were excluded, projected global losses in 2100 would be 23% as opposed to 60%, which is more in line with previous estimates.RELATED: Al Gore wrong again: Study delivers good news for Arctic ice trends, bad news for climate hucksters Photo by ALEX KENT/AFP via Getty ImagesThe economists noted further that the Germans underestimated "statistical uncertainty in their future projections of climate impacts.""Most people for the last decade have thought that a 20% reduction in 2100 was an insanely large number," Solomon Hsiang, a Stanford University professor who co-authored the August commentary, told the New York Times. "So the fact that this paper is coming out saying 60% is off the chart."'We have to cut down our emissions drastically and immediately — if not, economic losses will become even bigger.'The paper, which was originally published on April 17, 2024, was retracted on Wednesday. The retraction notice indicates that "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."While the German alarmists attempted to correct the data for Uzbekistan and make other adjustments, they found that "these changes led to discrepancies in the estimates for climate damages by mid-century, with an increased uncertainty range (from 11-29% to 6-31%) and a lower probability of damages diverging across emission scenarios by 2050 (from 99% to 90%)."In other words, the original conclusions hyped by the liberal media were worthless.When the now-retracted paper was first published in April 2024, the German researchers made no secret of the point of the exercise: justifying societal and industrial upheaval coded as "adaptation.""Our analysis shows that climate change will cause massive economic damages within the next 25 years in almost all countries around the world, also in highly developed ones such as Germany, France, and the United States," Leonie Wenz, lead scientist on the study, said in a release. "These near-term damages are a result of our past emissions. We will need more adaptation efforts if we want to avoid at least some of them," Wenz continued. "And we have to cut down our emissions drastically and immediately — if not, economic losses will become even bigger in the second half of the century, amounting to up to 60% on global average by 2100."Wenz and her team are hardly the first climate alarmists to have their conclusions proven to be as incorrect as they are outlandish.Failed presidential candidate Al Gore, for instance, concern-mongered in 2009 that in addition to the significant rise in the global sea level that was supposed to happen "in the near future" but never did, the entire polar ice cap was likely going to be seasonally ice-free, perhaps by as early as 2014.Gore told the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference that then-new research indicated there was "a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years."In September, a paper published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters revealed that Gore was dead wrong — that over the past 20 years, "Arctic sea ice loss has slowed considerably, with no statistically significant decline in September sea ice area since 2005."Rather than wait to be proven horribly wrong, Bill Gates — who has spent years fear-mongering about the calamities that would supposedly visit humanity unless governments neutralized certain industries and regulated into extinction certain behaviors — admitted in October that climate change "will not lead to humanity's demise."Like Blaze News? 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