The authors of a highly publicized study predicting climate change would cost $38 trillion a year by 2049 have retracted their paper following criticism of the data and methodology, including that the estimate is inflated.
“The economic commitment of climate change,” which appeared April 17, 2024, in Nature, looked at how changes in temperature and precipitation could affect economic growth. Forbes, the San Diego Union-Tribune and other outlets covered the paper, which has been accessed over 300,000 times. It has been cited 168 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
But after two commentaries published this August raised questions about the study’s data and methodology, the researchers revisited their findings. “The authors acknowledge that these changes are too substantial for a correction,” the retraction notice, published today, states.
The authors, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany, revised their analysis and posted it as a preprint in August. They plan to submit the revision, which they say accounts for issues raised in the critiques, for peer review.
“We broadly agree with the issues raised, and have made corrections to the underlying economic data and to our methodology to address them,” the authors told us via a statement from the PIK press office.
Corresponding author Leonie Wenz is deputy head of the Complexity Science Department at PIK. Wenz, lead author Maximilian Kotz, and their coauthor Anders Levermann, a professor at PIK, agreed with the retraction.
In July 2024, Nature issued a correction to the article that addressed rows of data which were “wrongly printed as a decimal, rather than a percentage point.”
Nature has retracted 32 papers since 2020, including three in 2024. The retraction today marks the sixth for the journal in 2025.
Authors of the first “Matters Arising” commentary published August 6 noted the article projected the global gross domestic product would be lowered by 62 percent by 2100, “an impact roughly 3 times larger than similar previous estimates.” The authors of the critique also pointed out the PIK authors had used a dataset for Uzbekistan with “anomalies.” By removing the Uzbek dataset, the estimate in the original paper “aligns closely with previous literature,” the critique reads.
In a second Matters Arising, published a week later, Christof Schötz, a professor at the Technical University of Munich in Ottobrunn, Germany, and a researcher at PIK, argued the analysis in the paper “underestimates uncertainty … rendering their results statistically insignificant when properly corrected.”
The PIK press office responded to our request for comment from the authors, including more information regarding the new data and where they plan to submit for publication, with a copy of the embargoed retraction notice, as did Nature’s press team.
The authors of the climate study say their reanalysis addresses issues pointed out in both commentaries. The revision “did not significantly alter the central estimates, but did increase the uncertainty range they sat within.” The new estimate for income reduction is now 17 percent after 26 years rather than the originally published 19 percent, according to a September statement from PIK.
Schötz told Retraction Watch the issues he raised “were not resolved by the authors’ correction.” He said the revised data account for some correlation between areas close together but “still ignores many strong correlations” between areas with similar data that might be farther apart.
The correlations the authors missed were “not due to physical distance but due to the regions being part of the same economic zone in some sense,” Schötz said.
When we asked for a response to Schötz’s doubts regarding the new data, the researchers responded through the PIK press office, emphasizing the correction is not yet peer reviewed. The authors also explained their decision to omit correlations between areas farther apart by noting the relationships “decayed with distance.”
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