An article on climate change cited over 400 times has been retracted due to the reliability of the data being called into question.The Food Professor, also known as Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, who runs an agri-food analytics lab at Dalhousie University, posted on X about the retracted article, titled, The economic commitment of climate change."The high-profile retraction of a Nature climate-economics paper isn’t just an academic slip-up — it signals what could become a wave of retractions targeting alarmist studies that didn’t hold up to scrutiny," he wrote."When the narrative runs ahead of the data, science eventually catches up. And it corrects itself. A good reminder: climate policy must be driven by rigour, not fear-based modelling.".Responding to Charlebois' post, Friends of Science, a non-profit composed of retired scientists which offers insights on climate science, also offered their insights on the matter."Ppl don't realize that central banks and insurance companies were using Kotz et al (2024) — the retracted study — to set their climate risk policies!!!"Friends of Science says among those who cited the article, the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) used the data in their climate risk evaluation models.The feds' Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) is a member of the NGFS..Charlebois told the Western Standard about the retracted article, "What's really important to underscore is the fact that it is Nature.""I mean, it's one of the most prestigious journals in the world.""It was cited over 400 times already," he continued. "And it's just a couple of years old — it was heavily cited for an article, and in a short period of time, it means that it was actually used for a variety of different purposes.".On why exactly it was retracted, Charlebois stated, "There's no question that there's climate changes is a phenomenon that exists.""It's just whether or not there's an urgency to address this issue, and sometimes you may actually feel that some researchers are pushed or motivated to push the crisis 'agenda' and that tends to provide bias and and, of course, mistakes."According to Nature's note on the retraction published earlier this month, the journal stated that the data was inflated."The authors of a highly publicized study predicting climate change would cost $38 trillion a year by 2049 have retracted their paper following criticism of the data and methodology, including that the estimate is inflated," it stated.
