The journal
Nature retracted a study published last year that found oceans were warming at an alarming rate due to climate change.
The prestigious scientific journal issued the formal notice this week for
the paper published Oct. 31, 2018 by researchers at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
They released a statement published on the
journal's website that read in part:
"Shortly after publication, arising from comments from Nicholas Lewis, we realized that our reported uncertainties were underestimated owing to our treatment of certain systematic errors as random errors.
"Despite the revised uncertainties, our method remains valid and provides an estimate of ocean warming that is independent of the ocean data underpinning other approaches."
Lewis, a mathematician and critic of the scientific consensus supporting the climate crisis,
posted a critique of the paper shortly after its publication.
Co-author and climate scientist Ralph Keeling at Scripps has taken the blame for the mistake.
The report used a new approach to measure the ocean's temperature based on measuring the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide rising off the plant's oceans. Much of the data on ocean temperatures currently relies on the Argo array, robotic devices that float at different depths.
The retraction of the article came on the same day that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its
latest report on the impacts warming on oceans and ice-covered regions.
The findings were some of the most dire to date, warning that if emissions continue, sea-level rise could reach three feet by the end of the century, a more than 10 percent increase from 2013 predictions. At the same time, the report found that in some cities and islands hundred-year floods will become yearly events.
Comment: This is what mathematician Nicholas Lewis
wrote about the paper:
On November 1st there was extensive coverage in the mainstream media and online of a paper just published in the prestigious journal Nature. The article, by Laure Resplandy of Princeton University, Ralph Keeling of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and eight other authors, used a novel method to estimate heat uptake by the ocean over the period 1991-2016 and came up with an atypically high value. The press release accompanying the Resplandy et al. paper was entitled "Earth's oceans have absorbed 60 percent more heat per year than previously thought", and said that this suggested that Earth is more sensitive to fossil-fuel emissions than previously thought. [...]
The findings of the Resplandy et al paper were peer reviewed and published in the world's premier scientific journal and were given wide coverage in the English-speaking media. Despite this, a quick review of the first page of the paper was sufficient to raise doubts as to the accuracy of its results. Just a few hours of analysis and calculations, based only on published information, was sufficient to uncover apparently serious (but surely inadvertent) errors in the underlying calculations. [...]
Because of the wide dissemination of the paper's results, it is extremely important that these errors are acknowledged by the authors without delay and then corrected. Of course, it is also very important that the media outlets that unquestioningly trumpeted the paper's findings now correct the record too. But perhaps that is too much to hope for.
Indeed, that's too much to hope for. MSM have not retracted their articles about this study, such as
CNN.
Comment: This is what mathematician Nicholas Lewis wrote about the paper: Indeed, that's too much to hope for. MSM have not retracted their articles about this study, such as CNN.