EXCLUSIVE: UK Office of Budget Responsibility’s Latest Climate Fear Mongering Claims Based on Junk Findings From Retracted Nature Paper

How Big Science fluffed the numbers and everyone bought it

One of the biggest scandals so far in climate science publishing has suckered in a number of government policy advisers around the world including the UK Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). Last July, the British Budget-leaking bunglers estimated that the country’s Gross National Product (GNP) would be 7.8% less in 50 years’ time due to the effect of human-caused climate change. Newly-revised ‘climate impact’ figures suggest that annual borrowing to fund the national debt would be over £50 billion higher at 2025 prices. The claims update and increase previous September 2024 guesses due to “several significant developments… in the evidence base”. An in-depth investigation by the Daily Sceptic can reveal that these updated figures are junk since they are linked directly to the disgraced paper called Kotz et al (KLW24) that was retracted this month by Nature.

The OBR is not alone in having statistical egg all over its face since the work that arose from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, a known nest of hard line climate activists, was widely used by other government organisations including the US Congressional Budget Office, the OECD and the World Bank. All seem to have relied on a so-called damage impacts model found in KLW24 that produced the headline claim that the world would be poorer over the next century by $78 trillion due to humans fiddling with the climate thermostat. Catsnip of course, to mainstream climate catastrophising clots with suggestions from the Green Blob-funded Climate Brief that the paper was the second most featured climate work in the media last year.