Scientists admit their errors, too. Photo: Unsplash
In October of 2018, researchers at the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Princeton University’s Environmental Institute submitted a report to the journal Nature, announcing some dire news about our oceans and our ever-popular preoccupation with climate change. Shortly after, a mathematician submitted some critiques of the report, which the esteemed journal and Scripps have now agreed to retract.
The gist of the initial study from Scripps concluded that oceans are heating significantly more than previously estimated — 60 percent beyond what had been outlined by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This, they argued, meant CO2 emissions needed to be 25 percent lower in order to avoid a three-foot sea-level rise by the end of the century. They predicted that “100-year floods” would become yearly events in some cities around the world, declaring that sea-level rise predictions from as recent as 2013 were now off by as much as 10 percent.
Nicholas Lewis, a mathematician and, for lack of a better phrase, climate change contrarian, immediately took to task dissecting the published report. He published his critique of the paper on the blog of Judith Curry, another well-known critic, pointing out errors in the Scripps Institute and Princeton University researchers’ original calculations.
“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,” Lewis wrote in November of 2018. “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.”
“Moreover, even if the paper’s results had been correct, they would not have justified its findings regarding an increase to 2.0°C in the lower bound of the equilibrium climate sensitivity range and a 25 percent reduction in the carbon budget for 2°C global warming,” he continued. In layman’s terms, Lewis argued that the October report had overblown its estimates of warming but acknowledged the researchers’ method of measurement as a valuable new tool. Rather than relying on the Argo array, a series of robotic devices floating at different depths in the ocean and therefore having gaps in coverage, researchers filled round glass flasks with air collected at research stations around the globe to measure the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide rising from the ocean’s surface.
So while the original calculations were refuted, the method is still being lauded as potentially able to revolutionize how scientists continue to measure and track ocean warming. Nonetheless, the new retraction of their 2018 report means the Scripps Institute and Princeton University researchers are fine-tuning their method before reporting their next round of findings.
“Although correcting these issues did not substantially change the central estimate of ocean warming, it led to a roughly fourfold increase in uncertainties, significantly weakening implications for an upward revision of ocean warming and climate sensitivity,” they wrote in their retraction. “Because of these weaker implications, the Nature editors asked for a retraction, which we accept. 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. The revised paper, with corrected uncertainties, will be submitted to another journal.”
