During countless debates on the introduction of the Green Deal that took place across Europe in 2024, supporters of the green ideology very often cited the report by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (Potsdamer Instituts für Klimafolgenforschung). This appeared in the April issue of the prestigious journal Nature last year. This report focused on modeling the economic impact of climate change by 2050, and according to its authors, global GDP will have fallen by 19% by then, mainly due to the effects of warming and extreme weather events. All this must happen, the authors believe, even if all ambitious plans to reduce CO2 emissions had the desired effect.
Now it turns out that a whopping 75% of the reviews before the report was published were negative. Among the critics, there was even such a scathing opinion opinion as: “I regret to say that the statistical methodology on which the research with this name is based has no scientific basis.”
So what went wrong with this report? For example, the data for Uzbekistan came from outdated or misinterpreted sources. As a result, the forecasts for this country were so terrible that they should have had a significant impact on global results, while Uzbekistan is neither a large nor significant economy. Uzbekistan was not the only one outlier. Overall, it can be said that the results were overly dependent on data from several key regions. In addition, the model used did not assess the ability of the economy to adapt to climate change. Finally, the authors departed from standard practice and did not provide the full data set or source code of the model, which made it difficult to check its validity.
The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research manipulated the data to support the narrative of an impending climate catastrophe in order to justify the implementation of restrictive regulations that affect industry and agriculture, but provide billions in profits to renewable energy producers. The scientists from this institute – would you have not known it by now? – and those from other countless institutes are simply lobbyists for the industrialists who bring new, advanced equipment and products to the market so that we wake up to a brave new world without CO2.
