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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.
"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.
This is what science does. People find something and publish the results for everyone to look at. If there is something wrong, other people point it out, and they go back to the drawing board.
This is how science is supposed to work; although, ideally, the errors are caught prior to publication - the process still worked correctly.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
>> Two weeks after the high-profile study was published in the journal Nature, its authors have submitted corrections to the publication.
Quit trying to time your studies around US election dates and we'll all be better off. (E.g. many informed people already mostly ignore employment and GCP numbers because they always expect significant corrections to the just-announced figures just around the corner.)
...be used by Client Change/Science Deniers "to prove" that it's just a big hoax and a big conspiracy...
OMG! Scientists are all lairs, trying to make billions of dollars for themselves. They were just caught lying again. Climate change is Fake News!
I think that captures a good portion of the posts we'll see here. The truth is that the IPCC studies are summaries of tens of thousands of studies, and they all point to the same problem and the same cause and the same predictions. Humankind is still largely fucked, whether this one researcher miscalculated uncertainty in this one study or not.
I don't respond to AC's.
Exactly. The only thing I'd like to add is a slight comment on this one sentence:
If you think Peer review catches mistakes then you need to learn more about peer review because that's not what it does.
To be fair, it does. The problem here is the assumption that peer review refers only to the reviewers who look at unpublished manuscripts before accepting them for publication. That's the first level of it, but it's only going to catch the most obvious issues with methodology, lack of sufficient literature review, conclusions that aren't well supported by provided data, etc. It's what you get when somebody in your basic field spends an hour reading your paper.
The bulk of peer review happens after the fact. The paper is published, it's read by a much larger pool of scientists in the field, many with competing theories that can offer a different viewpoint and analysis. Other research groups attempt to reproduce any experiments and can publish confirmation or inability to reproduce, etc.
It doesn't always go this smoothly: A lot of papers end up not getting published in prestigious journals like Nature, so not enough eyes look at every paper. Journals have a bias against negative results, so it's harder to publish papers that just reproduces somebody else's work and confirms they got the same result (unless it's a hot topic and/or controversial result), so not as much work gets done in that area as there should be done. That said, the basic process is sound, and the thing to take away from stories like these isn't, "climate scientists are wrong." It's, "climate scientists are the ones that point out when they are wrong after further review, because that's what scientists do. They're not protecting an agenda, and they're constantly looking for errors in each others' work."
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
You don't believe that global warming is a problem? But how exactly does switching to *economically competitive* wind or solar hurt things?
It might very well be a good idea, but the evaluation takes on a different tone when it's "this has many upsides and fewer downsides" rather than "do this or we'll kill you because we're all gonna die".
Many of the climate groups that have been the most effective are the ones that search for things that all parties can agree on rather than try to impose their (debatable) senses of conclusivity and morality upon the others.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
How about Anthony Watts? He's repeatedly shouted down as "not qualified" even though he's a meteorologist. He's shouted down because he's a skeptic. I don't know how many times I've seen links to scholarly papers AND actual checks (like from Mr. Lewis, here), on his site dismissed because "Watts is a denier and not a climatologist!:
How about Dr. Roy Spencer, an actual NASA climate researcher, who is dismissed because he's also a skeptic and religious (in particular, Christianity). But because he's a "denier" and crazy "sky god" worshiper, he's dismissed - doesn't matter about the factual nature of his data or his research.
And that "slight fault with the error bars" is a shift from +/- 0.18 to +/- 0.72, a full 400% increase in the error (meaning the error window itself is greater than the magnitude of the underlying baseline - meaning it's little more than a guess).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!