- Scientists behind a headline-grabbing climate study admitted they “really muffed” their paper.
- Their study claimed to find 60 percent more warming in the oceans, but that was based on math errors.
- The errors were initially spotted by scientist Nic Lewis, who called them “serious (but surely inadvertent) errors.”
The scientists behind a headline-grabbing global warming study did something that seems all too rare these days — they admitted to making mistakes and thanked the researcher, a global warming skeptic, who pointed them out.
“When we were confronted with his insight it became immediately clear there was an issue there,” study co-author Ralph Keeling told The San Diego Union-Tribune on Tuesday.
Their study, published in October, used a new method of measuring ocean heat uptake and found the oceans had absorbed 60 more heat than previously thought. Many news outlets relayed the findings, but independent scientist Nic Lewis quickly found problems with the study.
Keeling, a scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, owned up to the mistake and thanked Lewis for finding it. Keeling and his co-authors submitted a correction to the journal Nature. (RELATED: Headline-Grabbing Global Warming Study Suffers From A Major Math Error)
“We’re grateful to have it be pointed out quickly so that we could correct it quickly,” Keeling said.
In a statement posted online Friday, Keeling said “the combined effect of these two corrections to have a small impact on our calculations of overall heat uptake.” However, Keeling said the errors mean there are “larger margins of error” than they initially thought.
People gather at the beach to cool off as a heat wave brings high temperatures and humidity to Oceanside, California, August 14, 2015. REUTERS/Mike Blake.
So, while Keeling said they still found there’s more warming than previously thought, there’s too much uncertainty to support their paper’s central conclusion that oceans absorbed 60 percent more heat than current estimates show.
“Our error margins are too big now to really weigh in on the precise amount of warming that’s going on in the ocean,” Keeling told The Union Tribune. “We really muffed the error margins.”
Keeling and his co-authors used the study to debut a new way of estimating ocean heat uptake by measuring the volume of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the atmosphere. Scientists are still intrigued by this method, but all the kinks need to be worked out.
“So far as I can see, their method vastly underestimates the uncertainty,” Lewis told The Washington Post in an interview Tuesday, “as well as biasing up significantly, nearly 30 percent, the central estimate.”
Lewis pointed out the errors in Keeling’s study in a blog post published Nov. 6 on climate scientist Judith Curry’s website. Lewis wrote that “[j]ust a few hours of analysis and calculations … was sufficient to uncover apparently serious (but surely inadvertent) errors in the underlying calculations.”
Lewis is an ardent critic of climate scientists’ over-reliance on climate models, which he says predict too much warming. Lewis and Curry published a study earlier in 2018 that found climate models overestimated global warming by as much as 45 percent.
Lewis’s corrections were quickly confirmed by University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke Jr. Pielke called Keeling’s acceptance and willingness to correct the mistakes a “lesson in graciousness.”
https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1062545914399645697
“Unfortunately, we made mistakes here,” Keeling told WaPo. “I think the main lesson is that you work as fast as you can to fix mistakes when you find them.”
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Tags : energy judith curry nic lewis roger pielke jr scripps institution of oceanography
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It’s a good thing the science is settled, otherwise mathematical errors would be troublesome.
/sarc
“We’re grateful to have it pointed out so quickly”…..
You mean, AFTER you’ve published in Nature, and AFTER most MSM has picked up your results and championed it as a reason for major social changes… that’s “early” ???
This timeline is full of crazy people.
And after it was peer-reviewed.
“Move along folks, nothing to see here folks, the MSM only makes rare,honest mistakes, not frequent, gross and obvious errors from rampant incompetence in some part guided by editors and owners with political motivations…” — Leslie Nielsen in front of a fireworks factory exploding.
Yep! So the fact is that not only is the competence of the authors in question so is that of every reviewer and the publication which published it. Apologies and mean culpas all around are in order.
All credit to the authors , its rare to admit mistakes.
However I think we need to know how it passed peer review for a magazine as prestigious as Nature.
Did this one slip through the net or is peer review not always as stringent as it could be.
Does that stringency in peer review vary according to the author, subject or institution?
Everyone who goes through, and is recruited for peer review knows its value.
1) In engineering/science fields where there is significant competition for funding, peers often sabotage peers as best they can by sitting on papers they know either contradict or would be published before their own, so good work is hampered sometimes.
2) In engineering/science fields where no one cares about funding and investigation flows freely, peers are sometimes too involved in their own work to spend due-diligence on their peer’s papers.
3) In engineering/science fields that have political winds in their favor, no one is willing to spend effort to upset the gravy train, so nonsense makes it through.
Human nature will not be denied, we respond to incentives and that will not change.
I’m not really sure why you are dragging engineering into this. Engineers have real legal liability for such errors and tend to be much more conservative in this regard.
I thought that the idea is supposed to be: “I’ve been making a lot of errors, what am I doing wrong and how do I correct the problem so I can, more often, get things right the first time ?
Wonder if any scientists would volunteer to fly in an aircraft that was “peer-reviewed” (i.e., inspected) by someone who basically said “yeah, it has two wings and an engine, its an aircraft alright, clear for takeoff”?
Caligula Jones
QC would seem to be the answer to shoddy peer review.
But scientists would object because they are under so much pressure to publish.
Of course engineers are under no pressure!
I recently (and inadvertently) added six zeroes to a bank deposit. My wife had reviewed and approved the deposit which is standard practice. We then notified all of our creditors of the news and they, in turn, notified all of the credit bureaus of the news.
Unfortunately, some skeptical clerk at the bank checked the deposit amount against the check and said that there was a “large margin of error” in our calculations. We plan on having a correction sent to our creditors sometime in the future… when we can get around to it.
Want to bet if the IPCC take up the original paper that these authors will step in and say ‘no ‘ or will they take the money and run ?
To be fair to them in this ara peer review is basically down to three areas.
Is it alarmist in nature and so will get ‘headlines ‘
are the authors ‘one of us ‘
it is likely to be ‘useful to further the ‘science ‘
tick those boxes and its done and dusted no need to check any of the facts , data or calculations, so you can see how this was missed.
Yesterday I saw these quotes on another Blog:
The Washington Post, for example, reported:
“The higher-than-expected amount of heat in the oceans means more heat is being retained within Earth’s climate system each year, rather than escaping into space. In essence, more heat in the oceans signals that global warming is more advanced than scientists thought.”
The New York Times at least hedged their reporting, claiming that the estimates,
“if proven accurate, could be another indication that the global warming of the past few decades has exceeded conservative estimates and has been more closely in line with scientists’ worst-case scenarios.”
Can we expect to see the Post and Times report this error?
Probably but buried somewhere rather deep would be my guess
Steve -re your quote from the NYT:
“if proven accurate, could be another indication that the global warming of the past few decades has exceeded conservative estimates and has been more closely in line with scientists’ worst-case scenarios.”
Sorry – the warming is still the warming, and the non-warming is still the non-warming. They can make all the excuses they want that the warming is really in hiding, waiting to spring full force upon us unsuspecting Earthlings with catastrophic effects.
But the warming is still the warming … and the non-warming is still the non-warming … just as sports teams fans can make all the excuses they want for why their team is losing games, but the score is still the score, and the W-L record is still the record.
Duane, You obviously don’t know anything about the scientific method and statistics. They are trying to prove ocean warming by a new proxy. Their error range prevents them from doing that. NoOne has established a valid significant trend in the warming of the oceans. Argo floats certainly don’t show any significant warming. Their attempt to find it using a proxy failed for now. Deal with it.
but they did ‘find it ‘ as they set out to do . The problem was someone did what the peer review did not and that was ‘check the maths ‘ a virtual unknown idea in climate ‘science’ and which is after all only used by those ‘wanting to find something wrong with it ‘
I think you missed the sarcasm
What warming?
No one’s been able to find any, despite looking for it for years.
Warming? What does that mean in scientific terms? Does it mean delta C w/in 2M of ground of air or delta J of same or does it mean delta of total Joules from edge of atmosphere to center of planet?
When you are allowed to mix your units anything is possible.
Maybe somewhere deep in the oceans.
“Can we expect to see the Post and Times report this error?”
The Post’s prominent report is here
Nick Stokes November 14, 2018 at 8:20 am
Thanks for the link. Nearly 1,000 words. Pretty good splash. I’m not changing my opinion that Climate Science operates with a strong bias. The press is worse, way worse. We are bombarded daily with ridiculous headlines. Yesterday, USA Today and others told us “The latest problem to be linked to global warming: male sperm counts.”
In the original story, the shepherd boy finally does get eaten by a wolf. Maybe of acid rain, the ozone hole, obesity crisis, attention deficit disorder, asbestos, stray voltage, genetically modified food and all the things reported all most daily that “could” cause cancer, one will prove out to be true. Currently I don’t believe anything in the press unless I have good reason to. Nearly everything is run through a political filter. Probably has always been that way, but today it seems to be almost totally one sided.
I’m sure the Post had a meeting on how to put Climate Science in the best light before the link you provided was put up.
steve case November 14, 2018 at 9:18 am :
“Currently I don’t believe anything in the press unless I have good reason to. ”
When I was in elementary school in the late 1940’s , I remember my father telling me “Don’t believe anything you read [in the newspaper], and only half of what you see.”
I guess this is just some more wisdom from the past that has been lost.
That’s because they don’t run anything unless there is agenda behind it – in this case, damage control.
From their report –
“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.”
So they significantly inflate the central estimate and wildly underestimate the uncertainty, but the conclusions don’t “change much.” And I’m sure the “other studies” are probably all modeling exercises or other such group-think and circular reasoning, as usual. Sounds more like “religion” than “science” every time they open their mouths.
IOW, never mind the errors, and believe the propaganda, even though no actual ocean temperature measurements show any such “trapped heat” in the oceans.
You left out even if there is increased heat being taking up it is of little significance on human timescales as a FYI the deepest part of the oceans is still just above freezing. The thing not covered in any of those news articles is how all that extra energy is a problem, perhaps ask Nick Stokes to explain how all this extra heat comes back to get you 🙂
The only real measurable effect we would notice is the increase in sea level from expansion which is on a snail pace ( a mm or so per year). Even those measurements are throwing problems at this story in that the new instrument in Jason 3 doesn’t see the same increases the old satellites saw. We only have the 2 years of data so far but there is considerable friction building up as the results keep getting wider. I get the impression a few in climate science are starting to pray they got unlucky and the new measurements just happen to start as the sea level did a plateau.
Thanks for the link Nick. Two paragraphs from the story seem to conflict with one another…do you agree?
“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.”
“Gavin Schmidt, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, followed the growing debate over the study closely on Twitter and said that measurements about the uptake of heat in the oceans have been bedeviled with data problems for some time — and that debuting new research in this area is hard.”
“Our error margins are too big now to really weigh in on the precise amount of warming that’s going on in the ocean,” Direct quote from Keeling in this article.
From the Post “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.”
Let us compare “too big now to really weigh in” vs. “researchers can weigh in with less certainty than they thought” Do those two statements sound equivalent to ANYONE?
The Post did not retract anything. To sum up the Post article, it was wrong but it is still right because others have said similar conclusions, it’s not a big deal that it was wrong because it’s conclusions were right, and the error didn’t really change anything it just means they are less certain.
“Do those two statements sound equivalent to ANYONE?”
Yes, apparently to 99% of the commenters, who believe the correction is “good” science, and a small statistical correction that essentially makes no real difference in the results except to deniers.
“To sum up the Post article, it was wrong but it is still right because others have said similar conclusions”
Yes, in media, this is known as the “fake, but accurate” method.
Can we expect the BBC to report the ‘error’ as the first or second headline on their most popular radio and national news channel every 15/30 minutes for 24-48hours, and have 3 hours or more of the same doomsayers they interviewed on the back of it on for the same length of time admitting it was junk.
And it is junk, beyond the ludicrous attempt to save their face.
The more interesting part will be to see if nature publishes a supposedly being prepared re-draft
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/study-ocean-warming-detected-atmospheric-gas-measurements
Steve, ‘Can we expect to see the Post and Times report this error? Probably but buried somewhere rather deep would be my guess.’
It’s the answer to the clue for 4 down in the crossword puzzle. ‘Scientist who fluffed his math on global warming scare story last week?’ /sarc off
A welcome reaction, which should be the norm, but probably never has been.
Do they refund 60% of the research grant funding for making such a serious mathematical error?? If I made a 60% mathematical error as a Professional Engineer– and if equipment was designed around that error I’d be digging deeply in my pockets for 100% of the replacement equipment. jus sayin’
David new Guy-Johnson
Agreed! It certainly should be the norm but sadly hasn’t been for some time now.
Kudos to Ralph Keeling for his prompt acknowledgement of the errors found by Nic Lewis and his acceptance that they have a significant impact on the conclusions of the original study. On the other hand, the “peer reviewers” should hang their heads in collective shame since they obviously DIDN’T review anything regarding the paper’s technical content.
Now let’s see Nature issue a retraction and ALL the MSM outlets trumpet the fact that their strident alarmism was misplaced and that things are NOT worse than we thought after all. In fact, there’s nothing to worry about at all, as usual.
“Now let’s see Nature issue a retraction and ALL the MSM outlets trumpet the fact that their strident alarmism was misplaced and that things are NOT worse than we thought after all. In fact, there’s nothing to worry about at all, as usual.”
That’ll be the day! We might all die of shock!
That would be one way to get rid of all the skeptics.
Contrast this response to Nature’s non-response to critiques of its Antarctic warming cover story a few years back, and ditto to its author’s stonewalling.
you can ask if these issue had not be made public , but kept private if the authors would have taken the same approach or kept they mouths firmly shut knowing that the world would just move on .
So was its ‘good practice’ or ‘fear ‘ that made them take these actions ?
The only thing I’m sure of is that they rushed to publish and are paying for it now.
Kudo to Nic Lewis
Are you kidding, they(the press) will trumpet this as a success of peer review. Just in a way to make most think it is the normal peer review one would expect BEFORE publishing.
Thanks, CTM!
Wow, a climate scientist is admitting to a mistake to and through the mainstream media. Will wonders in this world never stop coming?
Too bad the rest of the lot won’t admit to theirs!!
Cheers,
Bob
Its refreshing that the climate advocates/scientists admit the error – the failure to admit error and/or the willingness to defend errors no matter how obvious taints the quality of climate science
Wonder when climate advocates (not climate scientists) such as mann, gergis, pages2k, marcott will admit their errors
When hell freezes over.
Well even then they’ll probably cook up some pseudo-scientific explanation of how CO2 caused THAT, too.
Are the report’s peer reviewers for Nature as gracious as the original
authors in acknowledging the math errors Nic discovered ?
Did the reviewers simply check for grammatical slips and spelling goofs?
A-form students could do that much.
What’s Nature got to say for itself as a prestigious publication?
Nothing yet I looked
…that’s all reviewers do
hacking the science happens after it’s released
So let me get this….. basic calculations are wrong, therefore they are still right, just slightly less right than before.
In other words admission of miscalculating without actually changing the message produced from that miscalculation.
Surely a complete withdrawal of the original findings and a correction in all the reporting media would have been appropriate
Still right, just more unsure.
Climate scientists are educated fortune-tellers!
Occasionally they’re right, by coincidence, but
they are never held to account for being wrong.
Of course not, I present to you as evidence, the original hockey stick, yes no matter what data is input the results will always be a hockey stick, but that does not matter because all of these other studies have miraculously recreated the same hockey stick, no they didn’t select their assumptions such that it made their results match this randomly generated hockey stick graph, it’s just that Mann was such a coding genius and visionary that even when he got it wrong he got it right, so it won’t be retracted.
Does this need the tag?
We should respect the researchers’ gracious acknowledgement of error, which was done quickly and without attempt to obfuscate or explain away the mistake. It’s uncommon these days, and we should encourage them by not piling on, as it’s tempting to do.
I agree Dave.
And, my general feeling is that Keeling is pretty serious scientist, so frankly, it’s not surprising to me that he would offer a quick correction.
rip
A first-year engineering student would get weeded out and directed to study of the humanities after that just plain stupid mistake. Well, at least that’s the way it was 40 years ago.
I suppose there’s a 50% chance they would have “mistakenly” calculated a LOWER least-squares slope than the correct answer, but somehow I think it was more of a 97% thing.
More like they got caught red-handed & had no choice.
Agreed. Of course the spin is still nauseating. I saw it on an elevator “new feed” in my office building. It acknowledged an error and indicated that their “conclusions may be less certain.” LESS CERTAIN?! How about flat-out WRONG.
s/b NEWS feed
Absolutely – surely everybody wants this sort of behaviour to be the norm in all areas of science, and so should be congratulated and accepted as a genuine error. We all make those after all.
Making people feel bad about this sort f thing will just make others more reluctant to admit and to release their data and calculations.
Well, if the “climate scientists” weren’t pushing policy based on their BS, nobody would care much about their errors or their willingness to admit them. Since they ARE advocating not just policy, but ECONOMICALLY RUINOUS policy, they deserve the derision they get for the pseudo-science they produce.
Do you honestly believe they would publish their “findings” if they didn’t support “the CAUSE?” They would bury them as fast as they could.
Normal behavior should be expected, not fawned and gushed over.
I would like to know more.
Is Nic an individual working alone in his own time, or does he too have a team working with him? If Nic hadn’t found it would the “error” have gone undetected?
Nic Lewis is a retired London financial quant, translation math wiz. He has a special interest in climate sensitivity, and has published several formal papers on it together with Judith Curry. He began IIRC with a critique of the AR4 WH1 sensitivity chapter. I discuss it in the penultimate climate chapter in The Arts of Truth. I know from personal face to face interactions that MIT’s Prof. Lindzen agreed with Nic’s AR4 analysis, because he graciously critiqued the entire chapter (and parts of the rest of the book as well).
Kind of like the creationists on their web sites pointing to triangulation of stars based on the baseline of the Earths orbit being a problem since the distance to stars that can be measured to that method are way older than 6000 light years and they discuss having to come up with a good argument against this……These heat in the oceans bozos can’t correlate their heat in the ocean to a slowing of the Earth’s rotation. It’s a very inconvenient fact.
If the heat was in the ocean, that will expand the ocean and every so slightly, but predictably, slow the Earth’s rotation. This effect would have to be accounted for to adjust GPS accuracy for instance.
I like new ideas exposed by any religious entity to be able to be fact checked against multiple lines of evidence before the faith based theory is expanded to support their religion.
Heat must be going in the oceans seems to be the favorite mantra of late because the alarmist religion can still stick to their religion even if the air temperatures start dropping. So I can see why they want to latch on to this one.
John Mason:
“Kind of like…” is correct, as there is a major difference between biblical creationists and CAGW believers.
Creationists accept the scientific method and believe “inconvenient science” is simply incomplete – that further research is needed to discover how apparent contradictions between scientific understanding and biblical understanding can be reconciled.
CAGW believers don’t accept the scientific method. They want to deny any data that contradicts their “consensus” and denigrate those who present it.
SR
So, with a major flaw in the paper has it been retracted?
The BBC pushed this paper’s results heavily. They have not yet updated anything on their website, but I did find that scientists may have found a hotspot. No, not that hotspot.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46202255
Charlie
That’ll be climate change then. It works in mysterious ways.
The article says the area affected is three times the size of Greater London. Hmm, I wonder how many Hiroshimas it would take to melt three Greater Londons worth of ice?
“The article says the area affected is three times the size of Greater London. Hmm, I wonder how many Hiroshimas it would take to melt three Greater Londons worth of ice?”
60 heat, apparently…
They must make massive mistakes. They banned proper peer review in climate science. Today peer review is only allowed by like-minded people. Because they already believe the study makes sense, they make no real attempt to find flaws in it. Nor can they. They can’t even allow themselves to think critically. Thinking critically is now known as being ‘contrarian‘. It’s on the same moral plane as ‘shill‘ and ‘denier‘.
Nothing on Nature’s website about it
Nothing on Science website either
Textbook example of CYA by the authors.
You’ve got to wonder if it weren’t for climate heretics such as Nic Lewis et al., would the mistake ever been found. Is the cult of climate even reading the papers or are they simply citing the results?
to be fair they do check papers for their ‘adherence to the cause ‘
quality control is known by the amount of headlines it gets and the highest standard is seen when it gets into IPCC ‘comedy script ‘
All you dang deniers.
Prof Farlow Fair-weather esq.
Hope not heat dot org.
The climate propaganda has been widely broadcast by the media. Expect the reported correction to be minimal.
Underestimating uncertainty is, unfortunately, not rare. If Climate Science were required to establish significance to 5 sigmas, I think most papers would have to be retracted. I don’t know what significance level the authors used in this paper, but I doubt they used 5 sigmas.
In this paper they used one sigma. Even with their underestimated uncertainty and overestimated trend the result would have been 23±24 x 10^21 J at two sigmas. Not a particularly impressive result.
Keeling may have “graciously” corrected some Maths, but his Premises are still wrong
Here’s an idea. Climate researchers should engage Nic Lewis to review their work before publishing. And pay him for the effort. I’m sure there’s some room in the grant proposal budget for it. It would save so much embarrassment at so little cost.
Can’t call it peer review, however. Nic is peerless in his work.
Now I wonder why “peer review” never spotted this obvious error?
no reviewer has time to hack the science….that happens after papers are reviewed and released
So, you’re saying the spelling and grammar are correct but the science .. that will wait.
Definitely not what “peer reviewed” is portrayed as.
Neo,
On the contrary! The point of so-called peer reviewed research is to expose it to the broader community of scientists, specialist and generalist alike, to see if there are issues. The problem is that because research has gone through pre-publication pal review, it is all too often accepted as being the last word on the subject and not subject to the detailed peer examination that should be done.
This should be viewed by climatologists (and others) as a proverbial warning shot across the bow to tighten things up.
Like this has been the first time? There has been a shots all around them and they still don’t stop. Some are either honest, or at least smart enough to realize that even a non-climate scientist understands that allowing a math error to stand makes you look like you don’t care about the truth and therefore will issue a mea-culpa thus allowing the press to say see “look how honest these climate scientists are” while down playing any mistakes.
Yes, and math. Don’t forget math.
Math that the experts consistently get wrong because, well, they’re scientists, not mathematicians, or statisticians. Have to concentrate on the real, actual important stuff, like science.
And only scientists can correct science. Except for the math parts, which, after all, aren’t very important in science.
Except for the math parts of science….
UNLESS the paper is critical of the Eco-Nazi “cause.” THEN they manage to “hack away” with a degree of effort far in excess of all the AGW propaganda reviews they have ever done, combined.
Sorry Latitude but, unless you were being sarcastic, I cannot agree with you. In my discipline peer reviewers were always chosen and only chosen because they possessed sufficient knowledge to “hack the science”.
Telescope to the blind eye
Mistakes, even obvious ones, are hard to see deep inside the group-think tank. Warmatologist peers live in the tank. Whereas, to a clear eyed true skeptic like Lewis, mistakes can be quickly seen.
This is such a pleasant contrast to the Marcott “blunder.” Marcott et al incorrectly claimed overly rapid warming, and weeks of criticisms were required before the main author sort-of walked back the claim.
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2013/03/fixing-marcott-mess-in-climate-science.html
The San Diego Union Tribune has run the story as well.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/environment/sd-me-climate-study-error-20181113-story.html
“However, the conclusion came under scrutiny after mathematician Nic Lewis, a critic of the scientific consensus around human-induced warming, posted a critique of the paper on the blog of Judith Curry, another well-known critic.
The findings of the … paper were peer reviewed and published in the world’s premier scientific journal and were given wide coverage in the English-speaking media,” Lewis wrote. “Despite this, a quick review of the first page of the paper was sufficient to raise doubts as to the accuracy of its results.”
“
60% is a ridiculous number. It would require more energy than is available.
When you think you’ve found something really spectacular, the thing to do is try to figure out what you’ve done wrong. That approach saves embarrassment.
Agreed. What you have to bear in mind, however, that when they find something that is “spectacular” AND in line with their preconceived conclusions, they will rush to publish and publicize it as fast as possible, before anyone ELSE figures out what they’ve done wrong, relying on the old principle of “a lie makes its way around the world before the truth gets its pants on.”
If you don’t publish, you won’t have a career in academia. ‘Interesting’ results get published. There’s no penalty for being wrong. What do think will be the result of that?
It is becoming widely acknowledged that science has big problems. link All that might be fine. It’s the job of science to find new stuff. You don’t do that without being wrong most of the time. The unforgivable thing is the sanctimonious twerps who insist on the authority of science.
commieBob
If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.
Keeling and his co-authors were let down by their peer reviewers.
The paper supported a certain narrative, so it went through. If their paper had come to a conclusion that contradicted the prevailing narrative, you can bet it would have been found prior to publication.
I suppose the lesson is to send your paper to someone on the “other side” and not just to “friendlies.”
Steve O
Perhaps the journal Nature might take that advice, they select the reviewers don’t they, and they now have eggy faces.