The initial value of process.throwDeprecation indicates whether the --throw-deprecation flag is set on the current Node.js process. process.throwDeprecation is mutable, so whether or not deprecation warnings result in errors may be altered at runtime. See the documentation for the 'warning' event and the emitWarning() method for more information.

$ node --throw-deprecation -p "process.throwDeprecation"
true
$ node -p "process.throwDeprecation"
undefined
$ node
> process.emitWarning('test', 'DeprecationWarning');
undefined
> (node:26598) DeprecationWarning: test
> process.throwDeprecation = true;
true
> process.emitWarning('test', 'DeprecationWarning');
Thrown:
[DeprecationWarning: test] { name: 'DeprecationWarning' }