This time of year, it’s not unusual for parents of younger elementary school kids to start having discussions of when their son or daughter will get wise to the reality of Santa Claus. At some point, one parent may say to another, “How old were you when you quit believing?”
That brings me to the same question, different myth. How old were you when you quit believing in man-made climate change? Or man-made global warming? Or man-made global cooling?
Before going any further, since we do have our share of lib readers, I want to make one thing absolutely clear to them before the fake misinterpretations happen. Conservatives don’t dispute that the client shifts day to day. That’s called “the weather.” And we don’t dispute that the planet’s climate isn’t constantly evolving. We are not Ice Age deniers.
But when you come out every presidential cycle and predict the end of the world in the next ten years (conveniently the time it takes for a run-up campaign and two presidential terms), we’re skeptical. Not because we’re scientists or science experts. Rather, it’s because we are used to being lied to, and we know how that goes. The tip-off for us, usually, is when all of your climate solutions focus on raising taxes and increasing government restrictions on American citizens. Then later, when we see all this money going to NGOs and a whole “climate change” economy, it kinda feels like a massive grift.
So excuse us if we’re nonplussed when we see that the journal Nature has had to retract a 2024 study that sought to estimate the amount of harm global warming will do to the global economy in the decades to come. I mean, the very premise of the study already raises a red flag. Did the study seek to estimate actual climate impacts on the economy, and how do you do that? Or did it seek to estimate the impact climate alarmists would have on the global economy through their own push for increased regulation and higher taxes?
That’s like when people talk about how the pandemic impacted the economy, when in fact it was government’s overreaction to a novel cold virus that actually devastated the economy.
As for Nature, here’s what happened. Researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) contributed a paper to Nature, and it was published April 17, 2024 under the title “The Economic Commitment of Climate Change.” The paper projected the economic costs of climate change by the middle of this century by relying on historical temperature, precipitation and economic data.
On Dec. 3 of this year, not even two weeks ago, Nature officially announced the paper was retracted, because “post-publication reviews” found the results were so off-target that a simple correction of the paper’s errors wouldn’t suffice.
In other words, the paper was a joke, and once it saw the light of day, some smart people caught some glaring errors, and Nature couldn’t cover for it.
CBS News, which when it comes to running cover for the left, usually responds with three words, “Hold my beer,” reported it this way:
The authors of a study that examined climate change’s potential effect on the global economy said Wednesday that data errors led them to slightly overstate an expected drop in income over the next 25 years.
The researchers at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, writing in the journal Nature in 2024, had forecast a 19% drop in global income by 2050. Their revised analysis puts the figure at 17%.
The authors also said in their original work that there was a 99% chance that, by midcentury, it would cost more to fix damage from climate change than it would cost to build resilience. Their new analysis, not yet peer-reviewed, lowered that figure to 91%.
Allow me to translate. CBS is saying that efforts to scare people into taking preventative measures (increased regulation and taxation) rather than fixing the damage later, sort of failed. The reason it failed is because the researchers conducted a data analysis overreach, and people who actually read the data and understood it called them out. Those people said the researchers overestimated how much damage from “climate change” may have to be fixed 25 years from now.
Here’s Nature’s official retraction.
It seems to me that this paper, like so many prognostications, is designed to create an imaginary world in 2050, based on whatever the authors could conjure up, and then to operate under the assumption that 25 years from now, all the things the authors imagined would happen have already happened, and that all they money they guess will be spent has been spent. That’s why you need to do what the climate change alarmists tell you now.
It gets worse. According to the Associated Press, “The researchers cited data inaccuracies in the first paper, particularly with underlying economic data for Uzbekistan between 1995 and 1999 that had a large influence on the results, and that their analysis had underestimated statistical uncertainty.”
You read that right, my friend. Conditions in Uzbekistan from 30 years ago were overly weighted in this research. This means scientists actually tried to predict global warming economic impacts 25 years from now based on the weather in a country in Central Asia from three decades ago.
I’m no scientist, so maybe that’s why this is all so confusing. Or maybe it’s confusing on purpose, so that in the end, people such as Bloomberg’s Mark Glongloff can pen rationales like this: “People’s eyes glaze over when you tell them, ‘Climate change is going to be really bad.’ They need to know how bad, exactly. So scientists and researchers keep delivering these forecasts to them, no matter how many reputational minefields they must traverse on the way.”
Two things. That word “exactly” is doing a lot of work in that paragraph. And second, a “reputational minefield” is like when you spew alarmist “climate change” BS and someone catches you with your alarmist climate change pants down. Apparently, if I’m reading this right, Gongloff thinks the tradeoff of losing credibility over bad science is one worth making.
Ever since the global warming/global cooling/climate change movement started, entire industries emerged. Laws were created. Lots of people became rich, famous and powerful all in the name of saving the planet. And yet when you look at how the planet is actually faring, none of it affected the weather. That’s the dirty little secret. It’s not about changing the weather. It’s all about the balance of power in the world. “Climate change” is just a class of law to take freedoms away, and a class of taxes to take more of your money away. But don’t worry. It’s all in good hands.
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