Democrats Love Citing This One Climate Change Study. Turns Out It’s All Bogus.

Democrats often tout a study that predicts the global economy will crash this century thanks to climate change. It turns out the study is bogus, according to a new analysis.

The paper, published in the journal Nature last year, claimed that global gross domestic product will plummet by 62% by 2100 compared to where it would be without climate change. About 19% of the global economy will be lost in the next 25 years, the study claimed.

The dire predictions were three times higher than previous estimates, causing alarm over the possibility that climate change could destroy the global economy within people’s lifetimes.

End of Summer Sale – Get 40% off New DailyWire+ Annual Memberships

Democrats pounced on the study’s terrifying warnings.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) read the study into the Congressional Record.

“Climate change is not just about polar bears or green jobs. It is about economic storm warnings to which we had better start paying attention,” Whitehouse said from the Senate floor in May last year, just weeks after the study came out.

Whitehouse says he has “been at the center of efforts to address climate change.”

The flawed study was the second most cited climate paper in 2024 by news outlets and on social media, according to one analysis.

However, a new analysis published in Nature this month found that “data anomalies” from one country, Uzbekistan, wildly skewed the “predicted impacts of climate change.”

Uzbekistan’s bad data showed the country’s GDP falling off a cliff back in 2000 and then nearly doubling in some regions in 2010, among other eyebrow-raising anomalies. The data was so skewed that it upended the study’s results dramatically.

The country has not experienced these wild swings in its GDP, according to other sources.

Without Uzbekistan’s data, the predictions about how climate change would affect the global economy were much less dire — global GDP would drop 23% by 2100, down from 62%, and it would drop just 6% by 2050, not 19%, according to the new analysis.

When the paper’s mistake came to light, even The Washington Post admitted the study’s authors made a “big error.”

During the peer review process, one anonymous reviewer expressed skepticism as well.

“I find all of this well explained and fairly convincing, yet, purely subjectively, I have a hard time in believing the results, which seem unintuitively large given damages aren’t perfectly persistent,” the reviewer said in a peer review document on the study.

That reviewer went on to approve the study, however, after speaking with the authors.

The study’s authors pushed back, noting that if they corrected for the Uzbekistan data — but also altered their study’s methodology — they got similar results showing a plummeting world economy.

Critics are skeptical.

“Science doesn’t work by changing the setup of an experiment to get the answer you want,” said Solomon Hsiang, director of the global policy laboratory at Stanford University and one of the authors of the new analysis on the study’s flaws.

“This approach is antithetical to the scientific method,” Hsiang told The Washington Post.