Two Retractions Raise the Question: Is Climate Science Really Settled?

Sometimes papers are published that overturn the conventional wisdom. Other times papers are retracted since what they purported to be true turned out to be false. Such is also the case in the climate change literature. In the last quarter of 2025, we have seen two important papers in each of these categories change the narrative by either providing new information or being retracted outright. They provide interesting fodder for contemplation.

Back in late September of 2025, a paper was published in the journal Nature Communications that shed new light on melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet. As the authors wrote, climate models traditionally assume that all meltwater that arises from bare ice in Greenland simply enters the ocean, thereby increasing sea levels. However, the study concludes that bare ice acts more like porous firn in which some meltwater is retained within the ice pack and is stored in either liquid or solid form.

The upshot, of course, is that much of the meltwater does not contribute to rising sea levels; rather, it is stored in ice which has not yet melted. This is akin to snowpack dynamics whereby melting snow simply refreezes within the snowpack, thereby increasing the density of the snow, but does not immediately lead to runoff to lakes and streams.

Consequently, the take-home message is that since climate models assume that meltwater from glaciers in Greenland immediately enters the oceans, they overestimate ice sheet runoff and the consequential rise in sea levels. According to the study, “direct measurements of supraglacial runoff are overestimated by twenty-one to fifty-eight percent during peak summer melt conditions” and “Ice sheet mass changes are overestimated by twenty-one to forty-seven percent relative to satellite gravity retrievals, and satellite laser altimetry measurements indicate that surface melt rates are overestimated by fourteen to forty percent.”

Of all the supposed results of climate change, the one that is most often cited is the increase in global sea levels because global sea levels have indeed been rising, although not necessarily because of anthropogenic climate change. The frequency and intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and droughts have not been shown to be changing in response to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions, even though climate models and studies that rely on their output insist that these deadly and disastrous events will be on the rise.

But this new study suggests that rising sea levels resulting from an increase in greenhouse gas emissions have been overstated. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has estimated that sea levels will rise between 1.4 and 2.8 feet by 2100, although they also suggest that a rise of 6.6 feet by 2100 is not out of the question — just to keep the scaremongering going. However, it may be that these estimates are, as the article suggests, “overestimated,” which then leads one to ask, just how reliable are these estimates?

As the article correctly notes, it is crucial that climate models get the values of rising sea levels right. Many governments around the world make policy decisions based on these IPCC projections. So, if the values are “overestimated,” bad policies may be enacted by legislators who have been duped into passing legislation based on faulty science. But, at least, this seems to have been an honest mistake.

But what happens when a paper is published and gets science wrong? It may be an honest mistake, or it may be an intentional oversight — simply put, a lie. When that happens, other scientists call the paper into question, the authors defend their original data and methodology, and the body of scientists weigh in on the validity of the original paper. Only when that paper is found to be egregiously wrong, due to fraud or incompetence or both, is the paper retracted.

So, it came as a surprise that one of the most highly cited papers of 2024 in the field of climate change was retracted in December of 2025. That paper, published in the prestigious journal Nature and entitled “The Economic Commitment of Climate Change,” has been cited 439 times according to the publisher’s website and PubMed and 429 times according to Google Scholar. Even the European Climate Foundation had been touting the paper as being the second most frequently cited climate paper by newsrooms, blogs, and social media in 2024.

But now, the paper has been retracted.

What was this paper about? The abstract indicates that while global projections of the macroeconomic effects of damages due to climate change only include long-term effects from changing temperatures, “we use recent empirical findings from more than 1,600 regions worldwide over the past 40 years to project sub-national damages.” The issue here is that current data are used to project future trends — an inexact science at best — of climate change on global economics.

The authors concluded that “the world economy is committed to an income reduction of nineteen percent within the next twenty-six years independent of future emission choices (relative to a baseline without climate impacts, with a likely range of between eleven and twenty-nine percent accounting for physical and empirical uncertainty).” They went on to state that “these damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius by sixfold over this near-term time frame.”

Thus, the current state of climate change will reduce the world’s economy by about one-fifth by 2050 even before any efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions are considered. In other words, we have already set for ourselves a path of economic destruction even before we consider putting an end to anthropogenic climate change. Prepare for the worst as it is already upon us.

So, why was the paper retracted? It apparently indicates exactly the narrative that the environmentalists want presented: capitalism has failed, and we are in for a dire future resulting from the climate change calamity we have wrought upon ourselves.

What happened? Well, as it turns out, the retraction was requested by the authors and not by the journal. Nature notes that the authors have retracted this paper and acknowledged that changes needed are too substantial for a simple correction, leading to the retraction. We are assured that a revised version is being prepared for peer-reviewed submission to Nature and will be published in due course should the revised manuscript be found acceptable for publication.

This sounds odd. Usually, retraction is levied upon articles by the journal itself and not by an admission of the authors that they goofed up either the data, the methodology, or the conclusion. So, what possibly could have gone so horribly wrong?

The culprit appears to be the country of Uzbekistan, a land-locked, Muslim nation in central Asia and a former Soviet republic. It lies in the heart of the “Stan” region, as it neighbors are Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. According to the World Bank, Uzbekistan is a lower-middle-income country experiencing rapid economic growth and significant poverty reduction, moving towards becoming an industrialized upper-middle income nation. Nevertheless, it still faces challenges with job creation and disparities, balancing solid development with average incomes below high-income countries. In 2024, its gross domestic product was $115 million. By contrast, the GDP for the U.S. was about $29.2 trillion while the global GDP was about $111.3 trillion.

This raises the question: “Why did the small country of Uzbekistan bring down this apparently important paper?” According to the paper’s authors, the results of the paper “were found to be sensitive to the removal of one country, Uzbekistan, where inaccuracies were noted in the underlying economic data for the period 1995–1999.”

Let’s parse this. Uzbekistan’s data — just one country — were corrupted over a five-year period even though the paper argues that “we use recent empirical findings from more than sixteen-hundred regions worldwide over the past forty years to project sub-national damages.” So, the data for just one nation of these 1,600 regions was corrupted for just one-eighth of the time period under study. Moreover, Uzbekistan’s GDP is only one millionth of the global GDP — $115 million for Uzbekistan as compared to $111 trillion dollars for the globe.

This is akin to saying that we tested the weights of 1,600 white mice and, to our surprise, one of them later turned out to be an Asian Elephant. Wouldn’t such an egregious error in the data for the Uzbek economy have been obvious to the authors from a simple inspection of the data since the resulting conclusions required, not just a simple correction, but a complete retraction of the entire article?

Looking into this more deeply, things only get curiouser and curiouser. The narrative regarding the retraction provided by Nature indicates that the authors “corrected the data from Uzbekistan for 1995 to 1999 and controlled for data source transitions and higher-order trends as present in the Uzbekistan data. They also accounted for spatial auto-correlation. These changes led to discrepancies in the estimates for climate damages by mid-century, with an increased uncertainty range (from the original 11 to 20 percent to the new 6 to 31 percent) and a lower probability of damages diverging across emission scenarios by 2050.” The Nature comment then notes, “The authors acknowledge that these changes are too substantial for a correction, leading to the retraction of the paper,” followed by a statement that a revised manuscript is planned for submission and evaluation by the journal.

I think I smell a rat. Apparently, correcting the error in the five-year data for Uzbekistan now results in a higher upper bound of 31 percent over the 20 percent found in the original data. It also results in a tighter probability of damages across emission scenarios by 2050. So, not only does the correction allow the authors to suggest a higher upper limit to the deleterious effect of climate change on the global economy in 2050, but it also allows for the paper to provide a more accurate assessment of damages.

What just happened? The retraction has the effect of making the upper-bound of the impact greater and reducing the uncertainty in damage across emission scenarios. Moreover — and I think this may be the real takeaway message of this retraction — the paper now has more attention than it did originally. That it will be revised and resubmitted guarantees that more scientists and news outlets will see the revision and cite it and, given that the revision has gone through an apparently extensive correction and evaluation process, it will be considered more bulletproof than the original. “Look, we had a problem with this important paper and we fixed it. Now, things are worse than we thought the first time. So, go to press on this revision and tell readers that things are worse than we originally had suggested.”

A closing question: Who are the authors of this paper who made the egregious error in the first place? Are they relative idiots or newbies who are prone to scientific errors or are they world-class scientists that you would assume were well above reproach?

It turns out that all three of the original authors are employed by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. In mid-November, the Potsdam Institute announced that its researchers had ranked among the top one percent of the world’s most cited scientists for the eighth time in a row. These aren’t lightweights in climate alarmist circles; these are the stars of the show. How could such a simple error have gone unnoticed by scientists with these credentials?

I have said it many times: the science isn’t settled, and it never is. Many cite the retraction of this apparently important study and again conclude that science wins because shoddy work has been exposed.

I disagree. I see this as a new tactic in the alarmist’s arsenal. You see, their view is that the science is settled, the only thing that isn’t settled is how bad things currently are and how bad they will become if we don’t take their immediate and draconian actions.

By drawing attention to this paper through the thin veil of an author-led retraction, the revised manuscript will double the attention and increase the predicted impact of climate change. It will be a win-win for the alarmist community and a big win for the authors and the Potsdam Institute.

You and I are the ultimate losers, however, as we simply get inundated with more propaganda.

David R. Legates (Ph.D., Climatology), retired Professor of Climatology (U. Delaware), is Director of Research and Education for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and co-editor of Climate and Energy: The Case for Realism (2024).

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