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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.)
Same argument could be made for rushing out findings, perhaps under pressure?
There's one hell of a lot of slashtards that are wishing comments could be deleted today.
...be used by Client Change/Science Deniers "to prove" that it's just a big hoax and a big conspiracy...
We recently had some spring flowers starting to bloom. And it's generally way too warm for the season.
Local weather means jack shit.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
(A) You can only do that if you have the data to question, which climate "scientists" are not always forthcoming with
To the contrary. All of the data is made publicaly available, as well as all of the computer codes.
or have run through magical adjustment algorithms you cannot have or question.
And all of the data adjustments are explained in detail, the reasons for data analysis explained, the codes made available, and the raw data available so you can do your own data analysis if you want. And at least five different groups on three continents do exactly that.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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,
Climate Change, "theory" purports to predict all things.
Climate change "theory" is very straightforward. It "purports" that carbon dioxide has infrared absorption bands that are well known, well measured, and well understood, and we can use this absorption to model radiative transport of heat in the infrared.
Climate change models make predictions. They do not, however, "purport to predict all things". In fact, they predict a relatively small number of things. One thing they do predict global average temperature... but even here, this is with a quoted uncertainty of about ±50%.
They don't predict weather.
As a result, its proponents have set up a situation where their, "theory" cannot be falsified.
to the contrary, it could be easily falsified. Climate scientists compare data to models all the time to check how well the models do.
So far, the models are holding up rather well.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
if being called a denier hurt your feelings
To be clear here Mr Coward, my feelings are never hurt being called a Denier, because I know what that really means - that I stand for true Science, for the right for anyone to question results even when everyone else claims the results are obviously correct and need no verification. It means the person trying to make someone else "feel bad" is coming from a weak position where they cannot argue on merits.
I am talking about science; I notice you seem to focus a lot on "feelings". Your "feelings" are irrelevant to science and fact.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
See, they didn't do their homework. Cows are better represented by parabolas according to the National Institute of Health...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
Just another day in Paradise
Easy. 'Hockey stick data' is at https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/... You will find raw station data at https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/h...
Like Geoffrey said, all the data is available. Your lack of searching doesn't mean it isn't there.
Same here where I live. We also had a white Halloween. Alas, that's just local weather and doesn't mean diddly-squat on a global level.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
No. You're just repeating the claim again.
People with 'physics and math' backgrounds are routinely told to shut up about climate and dismissed by 'climate scientists'.
Also it's _not_ just about error bars, the mean value is also wrong. Read TFA.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Which one what? The hockey stick data is a long discussed set, which you're not doubt fully aware of.
There have been several 'hockey stick' graphs published, by various people, using different kinds of data sets.
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!
The Dr. himself. NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal winner, and "Dr. Spencer’s research has been entirely supported by U.S. government agencies: NASA, NOAA, and DOE. He has never been asked by any oil company to perform any kind of service. Not even Exxon-Mobil." Or the word of #random guy on /. - I'll take the Good Doctor versus your slander.
PS: you prove my case; you don't like his conclusions, so you slander the man, and ignore his NASA data (not models - DATA) which shows that the IPCC models do not agree with reality. And then you choose the models over reality.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The data is not available - only the massaged results are available. The raw data would probably show a different result, much like the raw GISS data shows a different result after it's heavily massaged.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!