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

It's Called Science

[Bender0x7D1]

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.

Re:It's Called Science

[MrMr]

Peer review is not only the bit the journals do. The real exchange of ideas starts after the publication. In fact if nothing published was ever improved on, science would stop and become something dogmatic and immutable of no particular value.

Re:It's Called Science

[SlaveToTheGrind]

This is how science is supposed to work; although, ideally, the errors are caught prior to publication - the process still worked correctly.

The problem isn't the science per se -- it's how hard it is to unring the bell outside the scientific community. The media, and therefore the public, got whipped into a hot lather over the initial study. Google "oceans warming faster than anticipated" (even in quotes) to see how pervasively it spread in both the press and social media.

I'm quite comfortable the retraction will not be trumpeted a fraction as loudly, and even if it were, that a large percentage of people who read the initial headlines and ran around screaming bloody murder would largely stay silent.

That's how the news cycle works (and it's well understood to work that way), and thus a supposedly reputable journal racing to publication with shoddy work like this is grossly negligent at best.

Re:It's Called Science

[HornWumpus]

The error was _not_ found by a 'climate scientist'.

From TFA.

However, not long after publication, an independent Britain-based researcher named Nicholas Lewis published a lengthy blog post saying he had found a “major problem” with the research.

Lewis added that he tends “to read a large number of papers, and, having a mathematics as well as a physics background, I tend to look at them quite carefully, and see if they make sense. And where they don’t make sense — with this one, it’s fairly obvious it didn’t make sense — I look into them more deeply.”

Alarmists have repeatedly told me that non-climate scientist should shut the fuck up. Kudos to the journal and those of the authors that accept the mistake, but don't pretend that they found it themselves or that they are all accepting that they made an error.

Yes, I RTFA....Hangs head in shame.

This just in: science is messy

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> 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.)

Expedited results

[OffTheLip]

main lesson is that you work as fast as you can to fix mistakes

Same argument could be made for rushing out findings, perhaps under pressure?

...and this will...

[tmshort]

...be used by Client Change/Science Deniers "to prove" that it's just a big hoax and a big conspiracy...

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.

Re:that's not what peer review does

[msauve]

"If you think Peer review catches mistakes..."

It obviously doesn't always. I said it's supposed to, which is true. Nature's peer review policy specifically calls for reviewers to assess the "Appropriate use of statistics and treatment of uncertainties...Referees are expected to identify flaws..." You should have your posts peer reviewed to try and avoid further mistakes.

Re: Mistakes cost billions.

[Etcetera]

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.