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A couple weeks ago, a group of scientists was turning heads and making headlines in the conversation about climate change. “Oceans Are Actually Warming Faster Than Once Thought” was the most easily digestible headline taken from their research.
Researchers had concluded that our oceans have been absorbing more heat in recent decades than we believed — as much as 60 percent more heat over the past 25 years. But now the same team has come forward to acknowledge their original work contained errors and they now cannot reach the same conclusions with such certainty…somewhat. The researchers, which were led by Laure Resplandy of Princeton University, had measured atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide between 1991 and 2016 to come up with an independent estimate of ocean heat uptake in that 25-year period. But since the report was published in Nature on November 1, they recognized two problems in relation to using those measurements.
A new statement released by Scripps Institute from study co-author Ralph Keeling explains,”These problems, related to incorrectly treating systematic errors in the O2 measurements and the use of a constant land O2:C exchange ratio of 1.1, do not invalidate the study’s methodology or the new insights into ocean biogeochemistry on which it is based. We expect the combined effect of these two corrections to have a small impact on our calculations of overall heat uptake, but with larger margins of error. We are redoing the calculations and preparing author corrections for submission to Nature.”
“Maintaining the accuracy of the scientific record is of primary importance to us as publishers and we recognize our responsibility to correct errors in papers that we have published,” a spokesperson for Nature said in a statement. “Issues relating to this paper have been brought to Nature‘s attention and we are looking into them carefully. We take all concerns related to papers we have published very seriously and will issue an update once further information is available.”
