Paper in Nature Climate Change journal reveals major role wealthy emitters play in driving climate extremes
Looking close at the actual study, this article is making a definitive claim when the study did not. There are several assumptions and flaws in the data that the study itself calls out. A direct quote from the study states:
“Accordingly, our analysis does not explicitly assign full responsibility for resulting climate impacts, nor does it determine fair emission levels for any income group”
Immediately before this are the descriptions of the limited data and assumptions made. This article is sensationalizing what is basically a here’s how we could do this study
I’m afraid you are right. I fell into a rabbit hole yesterday trying to find were the claim of this article came from. I looked into the study itself, and didn’t manage to find how they defined the 10%. If I missed it, please point it out to me.
I copy-paste bellow a comment of mine on this, from another community:
The closest thing I managed to find was saying that 16.3% of adults worldwide have wealth of 100k to 1m, in 2023 [source: Global Wealth Report 2024 by UBS, see The global wealth pyramid at p23] but this is not what the article says.
Somebody suggested the World Inequality Database but on this topic, the results come by country and/or stats.
If anyone has a decent link to share on this topic, please do.
The study itself is fine for what it is. It gives some specific numbers in the abstract (where that 10% is listed), and it feels like the article writer took that and ran. If you look closer at it though, it is not meant to be a definitive paper. It is meant to be a here’s how we can look deeper using these methods. I think science journalism often leaves out that part of science. The, “we have an idea, we need to publish it to get other people to see and help refine it” part is not glamorous, and often inconclusive, but also very important.
Note that “wealthiest 10%” here means anyone that makes €42,980 ($48,675 USD) or more. Which includes most “middle class” Americans.
I just realised that we should also keep in mind that the time-frame of this study is several decades, so we are talking about about an average through the decades.
Which in my area is almost $20,000 below livable wage. I get that this not not true across the board, but reading the study and they jumped through so many hoops to get the data they wanted. They could have easily adjusted things regionally, but I bet that would have mucked with having a simple number to publish
Yeah, I just think it’s wild to think that you can be in the world’s wealthiest 10% and still be living paycheck-to-paycheck in the US. Although, as you pointed out, their methodology for reaching that number may be a bit screwy.
Oh, for sure eye opening. And looking further in the study was even like, hey, our numbers are not great, but here is a method we could use if we had better numbers. It’s the kind of paper you see that might lead to an actual study, but not meant to be definitive
