Scientists Acknowledge Key Errors in Study of How Fast the Oceans Are Warming (washingtonpost.com)

A major study claimed the oceans were warming much faster than previously thought. But researchers now say they can't necessarily make that claim. From a report: Two weeks after the high-profile study was published in the journal Nature, its authors have submitted corrections to the publication. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography, home to several of the researchers involved, also noted the problems in the scientists' work and corrected a news release on its website, which previously had asserted that the study detailed how the Earth's oceans "have absorbed 60 percent more heat than previously thought."

"Unfortunately, we made mistakes here," said Ralph Keeling, a climate scientist at Scripps, who was a co-author of the study. "I think the main lesson is that you work as fast as you can to fix mistakes when you find them." The central problem, according to Keeling, came in how the researchers dealt with the uncertainty in their measurements. As a result, the findings suffer from too much doubt to definitively support the paper's conclusion about how much heat the oceans have absorbed over time.

The central conclusion of the study -- that oceans are retaining ever more energy as more heat is being trapped within Earth's climate system each year -- is in line with other studies that have drawn similar conclusions. And it hasn't changed much despite the errors. But Keeling said the authors' miscalculations mean there is a much larger margin of error in the findings, which means researchers can weigh in with less certainty than they thought.

Comments

that's not what peer review does

[goombah99]

If you think Peer review catches mistakes then you need to learn more about peer review because that's not what it does.

Peer review looks to see if the methods are reasonable to the task, if the authors show an awareness of the literature on the topic and by consequence know the pitfalls and problems others have overcome. It looks to see if the finding support the strength of the conclusions. And when possible it looks for gaps or alternative hypotheses that would have been reasonable to rule out given the strength of the conclusions.

it does not check the work in detail that's essentially impossible except for glaring errors. Many peers won't even fully understand the topic but are experience enough to know how to check reasonableness of the approach and support for conclusions.

In this case the retraction is not of the main finding. Their data are still fully consistent with the stated mean energy absorption. What they are retracting is the error bars on that analysis. It's the difference between saying the mean of a set of data is wrong, and the probability the mean of the data is different by 30% than the actual mean. They got the probability wrong. So their findings are less certain in strength.