Alarmist Global Drought Study Retracted After Researchers Find Major Flaws
A study by Gebrechorkos et al. (published in Nature in 2025) claiming that ‘climate change’ is worsening global drought severity has been retracted, according to ScienceFiles
The ScienceFiles article reports that the study was heavily flawed, citing calculation errors, miscoded data, misaligned comparison periods, and flawed weightings.
The now-retracted paper claimed that drought severity had increased significantly since 1981, that “atmospheric evaporative demand” (PET/AED) had worsened droughts by 40 percent from 2018 to 2022 compared to previous decades, and that 30 percent of global land area had suffered moderate-to-extreme drought since 2022.
It now appears all these findings were incorrect and based on shoddy methodology.
Reality: no detectable global drought acceleration
The ScienceFiles article highlights a follow-up study by Xu et al. (2026, published in Communications Earth & Environment), which challenged the original study.
The main issue revolves around how Potential Evapotranspiration (PET) was calculated: In the retracted paper, soil dryness was overstated by assuming uniform moisture dynamics based on air dryness.
When Xu et al. recalculated it, drought severity was less than one-sixth of that in the retracted paper, and they found no recent detectable acceleration in global drought.
The ScienceFiles author accuses major mainstream media outlets (such as Die Zeit and the New York Times) of uncritically spreading alarmist “climate apocalypse” headlines based on flawed science without issuing corrections after retractions.
ScienceFiles criticizes the journal Nature and peer reviewers for allowing low-quality science to be published in the first place.
While there has been a significant drop in the number of alarmist climate papers being published, it remains a deep concern that other academics, institutions, governments the public are being mislead by this sort of claptrap that is published without checking the facts first.
Skeptical climate papers are routinely refused publication, but nonsense such as the study cited here are published without question.
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