- 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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“I think the main lesson is that you work as fast as you can to fix mistakes when you find them.”
Correction “I think the main lesson is that you work as fast as you can to fix mistakes when they are pointed out to you.”
But the real lesson – if they can learn it – is not to jump to a conclusion that things are worse than they seem. That you shouldn’t rush to a conclusion that is in line with your beliefs and ideology rather than the those that support the evidence, facts and truth.
There was no Superbowl Game to distract them so they could do the corrections ( a la Steve McIntyre)
Question – Are peer reviewers ever named? If not, why not? Seems to me if there names were published they would be more thorough in their review.
It would also be tougher to get competent reviewers, knowing their names would be dragged through the mud from every person who didn’t like their review.
“Imagine if the ocean was only 30 feet deep,” said Dr Resplandy, a former postdoctoral researcher at Scripps. “Our data shows that it would have warmed by 6.5℃ (11.7℉) every decade since 1991. In comparison, the estimate of the last IPCC assessment report would correspond to a warming of only 4℃ (7.2℉) every decade.”
https://timesofsandiego.com/tech/2018/11/01/worlds-oceans-heating-up-faster-than-expected-scripps-reports/
This was no mistake.
They hate Nic more than ever . . .
Expect a rise in blog attacks on anything new from Lewis & Curry.
Ronald Bailey weighs in with a detailed statement by Nic Lewis.
https://reason.com/blog/2018/11/14/widely-reported-ocean-warming-study-is-w?utm_medium=email
I loved Nic Lewis backhander at the end .. very funny
Not so much a backhander as a gentle kiss on their smug intellectually bankrupt cheek from a Glaswegian cap which has razorblades sown into the peak 🙂
Oops.
“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.”
OMG! 60 more heat!
Uh..
Is that, like, a lot?
Isn’t the plural of one heat “two heats”? So shouldn’t this be 50 heats?
But that certainly is much less than a gazillion heats…so we’re safe.
…Much of the data on ocean temperatures currently relies on the Argo array, robotic devices that float at different depths. The program, which started in 2000, has gaps in coverage…By comparison, Keeling and Laure Resplandy, a researcher at Princeton University’s Environmental Institute who co-authored the report, calculated heat based on the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide rising off the ocean, filling round glass flasks with air collected at research stations around the globe.
San Diego Union-Tribune Nov.15.
Could Readers who know of such things help this non scientist out
Tom Karl, former NOAA director did a study that purported to dismiss the pause and show ocean temperature data, using Argo buoys, needing to be adjusted upward as the current method of adjustment was too low…the end product being that the oceans were warming…even ‘worser’ than we thought.
The exceptional Jo Nova has this well covered in 2 articles…
1. Exotic adventures in global data to unfind “the Pause”, by Karl in 2015…June 5. 2015.
2. NOAA whistleblower tells how they used bad data to rub out “pause” for Paris. (Feb 6. 2017.)
From the first article..Ross McKitrick points out that to get the new NOAA sea surface data they added 0.12 °C to the buoy readings, to make them more like the ship data. That magic number came from Kennedy et al. (2011) where the uncertainty was reported as (wait for it) 0.12 ± 1.7°C. (Which is like saying there is definitely one apple here, give or take 17 apples. So this is what 95% certainty looks like?). ..Worse, that uber-extremely-uncertain-number was supposed to be used to adjust the ship data down so it was closer to the buoys. The authors felt the buoys were more accurate than bucket-from-ships. Even Karl et al paradoxically agree (have cake, eat cake), saying that because the buoy data is better, it should be weighted higher. In this fashion, the best data can get adjusted the most, to make it more like the bad data, then it can count for more….
Now Keeling and co have decided to use this new fangled method of…calculated heat based on the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide rising off the ocean, filling round glass flasks with air collected at research stations around the globe….
And surprise of all surprises they came up with the Oceans contain immense more heat than expected and it be ‘worser’ than we could possibly think!
Back to those who know such things to help out this non scientist.
Does the Karl study and The Keeling data mean that the current Argo calculations are doing a good job and are showing nothing to go all Drama Queen about?…and that be unnacceptable to the narrative.
Is this what it is all about..have Keeling and Resplandy..like Karl..been caught with both hands flailing about in a desperate search in the Data Cookie Jar?
“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.”
The main lesson is gets skeptics involved in peer-review, with provided data and listen to them.
The second lesson is change ‘fix mistakes when you find them.” to “fix mistakes when skeptics find them for you.”
The third lesson is “When the conclusion of the article is completely untenable after the correction ask for a retraction. ”
My 2.3 cents.
More important lesson: do not make mistakes. To prevent: replicate the study. If you can’t replicate all of it (data collection too) then, at least replicate the calculations from the data. Publish after the replication, not before.
The problem in human history has nearly always been what people do with uncertainty.
What I note here is that Laure, et. al. have owned up to their mistakes in calculating the error bars. Okay, good start – but they continue by asserting that the central estimate is unchanged by the corrections. Completely ignoring the 30% inflation in that conclusion, also identified by Nic Lewis.
Sorry, but this just changes my attribution for their motivations from “stupidity” to “malice.” They are covering for their basic propaganda by “acknowledging” an error that makes no difference to their actual assertion – that the “missing heat” is hiding in the oceans.
What should draw very grave attention from all reasonable decent and honorable people is the complete and collective silence from the MSM on this now exposed error and every other badly researched and joke peer reviewed piece of pro AGM literature found to be flawed in its methodology and or conclusions. That single fact is telling. This invites an observation that all the MSM want to broadcast is pro AGM news on this subject. But why? Where are the investigative reporters hungry for a scandal to expose? Silence. What this leads me to wonder is just who is telling the MSM what to report and what not to report because they act collectively. Who is pulling their strings? Someone or something very powerful indeed!
Where is the public denouncement of clearly shoddy (if there was any) peer reviewing? Silence. Where are the headlines rejoicing that nothing is as bad as we were led to believe? Silence. The conclusions of the original flawed work are now a new part of the warming industry propaganda arsenal because which of the MSM published an update to inform their readers/viewers/listeners that the papers findings were not correct? Silence.
We are totally dependent on the personal dilligence of exceptional unpaid individuals to find errors and report them, errors that this trillion and more a year dollar mafia like industry demonstrably fails to find and why? BECAUSE this is all about power and money and nothing at all to do with finding truth. They tell a story, any story and if by good fortune some data can be bent in the right direction all well and good and their lackeys in the MSM will dutifully gush all over it and tell us the most juicy and doom laden bits. When a brave honest mind exposes the claims as false or innacurate look how they are treated….. by other scientists and then publicaly hung out to dry. Thank you Dr Crockford and Dr. Ridd FOR BEING SCIENTISTS! The best wecan hope for is that person will be personally vilified…..notice how rarely do we hear that person’s work challenged.
The global number of people willing to act if not criminally then very dishonestly to obtain or keep a place at the public funded feeding trof is growing and growing and I would not put it past some of their foot soldiers to shoot you down in the street if you are seen as a threat to either their blind religion or their worthless invented livelihood. If a person produced today irrefutable proof that there was no problem at all from AGM and that we can relax, how long exactly do you think they would live?
How long before their personal lives would be cynically attacked and destroyed as every muscle this multiheaded hydra is flexed to deal with this serious threat to it’s existance?
I am truly ashamed of the depths to which people will sink who belong to the collective family of scientists to which I belong, people who have willingly sold their souls to be participants in the AGM gravytrain. You have done science, the critical foundation of our 21st century existance irreparable damage. I call you out as morally and intellectually bankrup as well as being cowards both individually and collectively. Indeed, I can with clarity of mind say that I view prostitution as an eminently more respectable profession than yours. A pox on you all.
The silence is deafening
This was also reported in the Washington Beacon:
https://freebeacon.com/issues/alarming-study-claiming-global-warming-heating-oceans-based-math-error/
Wherein the reporter also notes that when Nic Lewis reported the error to Resplandy, for whom the paper is named, he got crickets. A lesson in rudeness?
Here’s an article about this in the Canadian newspaper the National Post, I read the article then went bask to it a few days later and got dead air (blank web article).
Here’s the blank page link
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/scientists-acknowledge-key-errors-in-study-of-how-fast-the-oceans-are-warming
Sun Spot November 15, 2018 at 6:15 am
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/scientists-acknowledge-key-errors-in-study-of-how-fast-the-oceans-are-warming
still works for me in New Zealand at 2050 15 Nov 18 on Chrome on Win 10.
Maybe you are using IOS or whatever they call it?
Ooops left out the “GMT”. Should be “2050 GMT 15 Nov 18 “
I would perhaps be interested in seeing the precise nature of the error but probably not. I would be intensely interested in seeing how recent testing of the composition of ocean out gassing compares to the same tests conducted in previous times. Oh wait……this is a new method, right? Which means there is no historical references with respect to this new method, regardless of any error or miscalculation involved.
Which basically makes the entire study a monumental waste of time which should never have been given any consideration as a basis for confirming or denying the existence of any trend extending into the past.
Not the case here (I believe, it is too big of a mistake!) but reminds me of my time in academia. Some researchers had a trick, not to be abused though, to increase number of publications in high impact journals… or sometimes just increase number of publications: publish your paper with a tiny mistake (such a incorrect legend on a picture, etc) so you can do a “corrigendum” later on… 2 papers in a high impact journal for the price of one, as they are automatically counted as such in so many of the “statistics” used to weight the impact of an academic. Unless there is an A**hole on the committee that has unfortunately nothing else to do than check the details of publication record (not enough committees to attend, hence bored), easy way to ace it.
This story just made “front page” on the FoxNews website. Congrats to Nic Lewis!
Several days later Dr Resplandy’s page at Princeton under ‘related press coverage’ still contains links to all the alarming coverage, but no link to any coverage of the mistakes, such as the WP article. As she seems to have been behind much of that coverage her silence now seems strange.