THE journal Nature has finally retracted a ‘fatally flawed’ study used to justify projections of “catastrophic future climate impacts”, and its authors have admitted that the errors are ‘too substantial’ for just a correction.
Nature retracted “The Economic Commitment of Climate Change,” by Kotz et al. (KLW24), more than 18 months after first learning that the paper was fatally flawed.
Welcoming the retraction, Climate Depot contributor Roger Pielke Jr said it was not just the long overdue retraction that mattered, but the reaction to it, which indicated that while the mainstrem climate narrative still had a grip on the climate discussion, things may be changing for the better.
“Back in August, I explained the growing scandal around KLW24: It wasn’t just a fatally flawed paper, but a flawed paper that had taken on outsized influence in climate advocacy and policy.
“For instance, KLW24 was the second most featured climate paper by the media in all of 2024, according to Carbon Brief.”
Pielke says more importantly, KLW24 has been widely used in policy around the world to justify projections of catastrophic future climate impacts and as a basis for cost-benefit analyses of mitigation. Notable examples include:
Significantly, the Network for Greening the Financial System, a consortium comprised primarily of central banks around the world, adopted KLW24 as the basis for its “damage function” used by bank regulators to stress test monetary policies against climate risks.
“Consequently, it is not an exaggeration to claim that KLW24 has a potential financial impact on just about everyone. Of note, the U.S. Federal Reserve withdrew from the NGFS on January 17, 2025,” says Pielke.
He noted that The New York Times cited some of the critics of KLW24.
“For instance, Christof Schötz (who, interestingly, happens to be a colleague of the authors of KLW24 at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research) pulls no punches with his accurate portrayal of KLW24:
“The paper does not provide additional evidence of economic damages from climate change, nor can it serve as a basis for reliable future projections,” said Schotz.
The NYT also cited Lint Barrage, chair of energy and climate economics at ETH Zurich, who offered an important warning, and not just to the authors of KLW24, but more broadly to the climate research community:
“It can feel sometimes, depending on the audience, that there’s an expectation of finding large estimates. If your goal is to try to make the case for climate change, you have crossed the line from scientist to activist, and why would the public trust you?”
