The authors of a highly publicized study “The economic commitment of climate change”, which appeared April 17, 2024, in Nature, 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.
But after two commentaries published this August raised questions about the study’s data and methodology, the researchers revisited their findings. “The authors acknowledge that these changes are too substantial for a correction,” the retraction notice states.
The authors, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany, revised their analysis and posted it as a preprint in August, 2025. They plan to submit a revision, which they say accounts for issues raised in the critiques, for peer review.
