Yesterday, the scientific journal Nature retracted a 2024 study that predicted a global economic collapse from climate change. The retraction was due to inaccuracies around the data set used.
The study predicted that the global economic damage from climate change over the next 25 years will be six times greater than the cost of reducing emissions to limit the temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius. This finding made the economic cost associated with transitioning to green energy seem low compared to the cost of letting climate change take its course.
According to Carbon Brief, the study was the second most referenced climate paper in 2024. Corporate media outlets, financial institutions, central banks and regulators rushed to cite this study as proof that climate change is not just an environmental issue but an extinction-level event for capitalism itself.
In the following, Dr. Mathew Wielikici asks us to imagine what would happen if we did the opposite of what climate activists demand and burned every last bit of “fossil fuel” we could get our hands on.
Related: Top Scientific Journal Retracts Study Predicting Global Economic Collapse from Climate Change, National Review, 3 December 2025
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What If We Burned It All?
By Dr. Matthew Wielicki, 3 December 2025
In 2024, the journal Nature published a blockbuster paper from the Potsdam Institute titled ‘The economic commitment of climate change’. The headline claim was simple and scary.
Even if emissions stopped rising tomorrow, past warming has already “committed” the world to an income reduction of about 19% by 2050, which they translated to roughly $38 trillion in damages.
Follow-up coverage highlighted even more dramatic long-range numbers. By 2100, unchecked climate change was said to be able to slash global GDP by about 62%. Financial institutions, central banks, and regulators rushed to cite the paper as proof that climate change is not just an environmental issue but an extinction-level event for capitalism itself.
Fast forward to this week. After independent researchers dug into the data, the authors have now retracted the original paper.
A single outlier dataset from Uzbekistan’s GDP records in the early 1990s was allowed to dominate the statistics. When that outlier is handled correctly, the projected long-term GDP loss drops from about 62% to around 23% – roughly a factor of three smaller for that time horizon and still grossly overstated in my opinion.
Nature pulled the original study. The Potsdam team insists that their “core message” still holds, and they are already circulating a new version that again claims large climate damages, just with slightly smaller numbers.
This is not just an academic embarrassment. Numbers like these feed directly into the social cost of carbon, the dollar value that agencies attach to each extra tonne of CO₂. That single number is then used to justify everything from power plant rules to automobile standards to massive green spending programmes.
The Biden administration had been pushing the social cost of carbon up toward $200 per tonne using a mix of climate economics models and judgment calls about “catastrophic risk.” Studies that scream “tens of trillions in damages” give political cover for those choices, even when the math behind them later falls apart. Below is a statement issued by the Biden EPA on 8 December 2023:
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) updated its estimate of the “social cost” of carbon dioxide – a contrived way of increasing the cost of everything made from or using hydrocarbon resources to vilify those projects and keep them from becoming economic. The new estimate nearly quadruples the estimated cost of carbon dioxide to the world that the Biden administration is currently using – a change that will result in stronger climate rules and more stringent regulations that will increase costs for consumers, as the least expensive materials will now cost more when projects are being considered and their costs estimated.
EPA Ups Estimates for the Social Cost of Carbon, Institute for Energy Research (IEA), 8 December 2023
If this sounds familiar, it should. In a recent piece I called ‘The 7 Trillion Lie’, I walked through how the International Monetary Fund magically inflates fossil fuel “subsidies” to $7 trillion per year by counting uncharged imaginary carbon taxes as if they were cash payments to oil companies. These numbers show up in speeches, reports and talking points and then get used to justify vast green spending that has very little to do with real pollution.
In other words, the economic foundation for climate emergency politics is a stack of model-based extrapolations piled on top of each other. When one of the flagship bricks gets yanked out by a retraction, I think it is fair to ask some uncomfortable questions.
A Thought Experiment You Will Not See In Official Reports
Forget “net zero by 2050” and elaborate tax models. Imagine instead that humanity did the opposite of what climate activists demand.
What if we burned every last bit of fossil fuel, we could get our hands on?
Climate campaigners claim that such a world would be uninhabitable. Yet, the geologic record shows long intervals with CO₂ at or above 1,000 parts per million (ppm), where life flourished – and even an ice age during the Ordovician and Silurian, when estimated CO₂ was far higher than today. I explored those contradictions in detail in my earlier piece ‘Does CO₂ drive global surface temperatures?’
In other words, even if we imagine the extreme scenario that terrifies the United Nations and the climate industrial complex, the planet stubbornly refuses to behave like a simple one knob thermostat.
Note from the author: [The remainder of this article is for paid subscribers to Dr. Wielicki’s Substack page only.] Below the paywall, I am going to walk through this thought experiment step by step. We will look at how much fossil fuel there really is when you include things like gas hydrates, what mainstream models say about a 1000 parts per million world and what deep time climate history tells us about the limits of CO₂ centric thinking.
About the Author
Dr. Matthew Wielicki is a former assistant professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Alabama and a post-doctoral research scientist in the Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences and the Institute for Planets and Exoplanets at the University of California, Los Angeles. He writes articles on a Substack page titled ‘Irrational Fear’, which you can subscribe to and follow HERE.
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