By LifeZette News Staff
The scientific journal Nature has retracted a 2024 climate study after researchers and outside economists identified significant data flaws that affected the report’s findings on long-term economic damage from climate change.
The decision was announced Wednesday and follows months of discussion among experts who questioned the study’s projections.
The original study, published in April 2024, concluded that climate change would cause substantially more economic harm by the end of the century than earlier estimates suggested.
Its findings were widely cited, covered extensively in global media, and incorporated into risk-management modeling used by central banks.
The study projected a potential 62 percent decline in global economic output by the year 2100 if carbon emissions continued without major reductions.
Economists reviewing the study later found irregularities in the dataset for Uzbekistan.
That data point, they said, substantially altered the overall results.
When Uzbekistan was removed from the dataset, the economists determined that the long-term economic damage estimates aligned much more closely with previous research.
Under those revised conditions, global output would decline by an estimated 23 percent by 2100, not the 62 percent predicted in the original publication.