On the heels of major Democratic Party donor Bill Gates reversing course by admitting that climate change will not “decimate civilization,” the world’s most prestigious scientific journal, Nature, officially retracted a key pillar of climate alarmism this week, functionally admitting that much of the anti-energy policy pushed by global elites has no basis in fact.
First published in April of 2024, “The Economic Commitment of Climate Change” broke with the already alarmist consensus on global warming by predicting that economic harms from climate change are five to 20 times larger than more widely accepted estimates. Instead of being viewed skeptically, policymakers from around the world eagerly embraced the projections, incorporating its projections into policy prescriptions regarding topics such as finance, energy, trade, and agriculture. According to Carbon Brief, it was the second most referenced climate paper in 2024.
Policymaking entities relying on the paper included the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Bank, and, most importantly, the Network for Greening the Financial System. The NGFS, a consortium of central banks from around the world, used the paper’s projections as the basis for bank regulators to “stress test” global monetary policy against climate risks.
However, as eagerly as climate activists and global elites embraced the paper, some scientists pushed back. These rogue scientists pointed out that the paper’s underlying statistical model exaggerated economic harm from climate change at every step. It treated today’s correlation between heat and poverty as if heat were the cause of that poverty. It assumed nations would not adapt or innovate as temperatures rise. It double-counted economic harms attributed to climate change. And it ignored any possible benefits from warmer temperatures. It was as if the authors of the study specifically designed their model to produce the most catastrophic projections possible, which is exactly what it now appears they did.
Initially, the authors made modest corrections to their paper, addressing each concern as it arose, but obvious errors continued to accumulate until Nature’s editors were compelled to retract the entire paper. This is a positive development that hopefully will be followed by changes to policy recommendations from every entity that relied on the paper when it was first published.
Fortunately, the Trump administration has always recognized climate alarmism for the hoax that it is, prioritizing domestic energy production over phantom harms from fabricated activist models. As Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright wrote in a report before joining the administration, “Climate change is a global challenge but is far from the world’s greatest threat to human life… Making energy more expensive or unreliable compromises people, national security, and the environment.”
Climates change. It is what they do. Adaptation was, is, and always will be humanity’s best response to our ever-changing climate. “Pre-modern humans survived multiple glaciations with simply massive temperature and climate swings,” Wright’s report reads. “Modern humans are vastly better equipped to deal with climate change today.”
BIPARTISAN BREAKTHROUGH ON OVERCRIMINALIZATION
Now that both Nature and Democratic Party megadonors, like Gates, are recognizing that climate change is not the extinction-level event they initially made it out to be, hopefully both parties can focus on policies that encourage economic growth and adaptation rather than a war on fossil fuels.
Nature’s retraction exposes how far climate policy has drifted from evidence and toward narrative. With the alarmist model discredited, leaders should reset their priorities: invest in adaptation, support affordable energy, and pursue policies that strengthen — not weaken — economic resilience in a changing world.