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Earth Science Technology

Scientists Acknowledge Key Errors in Study of How Fast the Oceans Are Warming (washingtonpost.com) 280

A major study claimed the oceans were warming much faster than previously thought. But researchers now say they can't necessarily make that claim. From a report: Two weeks after the high-profile study was published in the journal Nature, its authors have submitted corrections to the publication. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography, home to several of the researchers involved, also noted the problems in the scientists' work and corrected a news release on its website, which previously had asserted that the study detailed how the Earth's oceans "have absorbed 60 percent more heat than previously thought."

"Unfortunately, we made mistakes here," said Ralph Keeling, a climate scientist at Scripps, who was a co-author of the study. "I think the main lesson is that you work as fast as you can to fix mistakes when you find them." The central problem, according to Keeling, came in how the researchers dealt with the uncertainty in their measurements. As a result, the findings suffer from too much doubt to definitively support the paper's conclusion about how much heat the oceans have absorbed over time.

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.

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Scientists Acknowledge Key Errors in Study of How Fast the Oceans Are Warming

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  • by Bender0x7D1 ( 536254 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @09:45AM (#57642090)

    This is what science does. People find something and publish the results for everyone to look at. If there is something wrong, other people point it out, and they go back to the drawing board.

    This is how science is supposed to work; although, ideally, the errors are caught prior to publication - the process still worked correctly.

    • by msauve ( 701917 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @09:49AM (#57642114)
      Nature is a peer reviewed publication. So, there were multiple, independent levels of error. That's not how it's supposed to work.
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Peer review isn't about repeating the test or confirming the analysis, it's about checking whether the conclusion matches the groupthink. This did.

        • by hey! ( 33014 )

          Peer review isn't about repeating the test or confirming the analysis, it's about checking whether the conclusion matches the groupthink. This did.

          And your evidence for this view would be... what? That papers get published that disagree with what you've been told is the truth?

          I'm not a scientist, but I've worked with scientists and have helped some of them respond to peer review comments. If you've ever actually seen peer review at work, it's the farthest thing from groupthink there is. You have to remember: scientists in a field are competitors.

          Each reviewer has a distinctive persona or style. Some reviewers are obviously very nice people. The

      • by MrMr ( 219533 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @10:04AM (#57642196)
        Peer review is not only the bit the journals do. The real exchange of ideas starts after the publication. In fact if nothing published was ever improved on, science would stop and become something dogmatic and immutable of no particular value.
      • by Bender0x7D1 ( 536254 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @10:06AM (#57642204)

        Nature is a peer reviewed publication. So, there were multiple, independent levels of error. That's not how it's supposed to work.

        Ideally it works that way. However, it often fails in one way or another (skipped reviews, for profit models, no one wants to say a leader in a field is wrong, etc.) Which is why publication to a wide audience is, essentially, the final fail safe.

      • by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @10:40AM (#57642450)

        If you think Peer review catches mistakes then you need to learn more about peer review because that's not what it does.

        Peer review looks to see if the methods are reasonable to the task, if the authors show an awareness of the literature on the topic and by consequence know the pitfalls and problems others have overcome. It looks to see if the finding support the strength of the conclusions. And when possible it looks for gaps or alternative hypotheses that would have been reasonable to rule out given the strength of the conclusions.

        it does not check the work in detail that's essentially impossible except for glaring errors. Many peers won't even fully understand the topic but are experience enough to know how to check reasonableness of the approach and support for conclusions.

        In this case the retraction is not of the main finding. Their data are still fully consistent with the stated mean energy absorption. What they are retracting is the error bars on that analysis. It's the difference between saying the mean of a set of data is wrong, and the probability the mean of the data is different by 30% than the actual mean. They got the probability wrong. So their findings are less certain in strength.

        • by msauve ( 701917 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @10:59AM (#57642602)
          "If you think Peer review catches mistakes..."

          It obviously doesn't always. I said it's supposed to, which is true. Nature's peer review policy specifically calls for reviewers to assess the "Appropriate use of statistics and treatment of uncertainties...Referees are expected to identify flaws..." You should have your posts peer reviewed to try and avoid further mistakes.
          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by Anonymous Coward

            Disclaimer: I have done vast amounts of peer review in my field (physics) but did not review this paper.

            You've missed the point of what peer review actually does. It identifies errors of logic, and checks for feasibility. It does NOT redo calculations. In this case, the stats and uncertainties were treated appropriately, but calculated wrong. Peer review is NOT designed to catch that kind of error. If it were, it would take me as long to review a paper as many authors take to write it, or even longer as the

          • Doesn't always find mistakes? This paper is relatively new. Is there a time limit that science puts in place before errors can be found? We have found errors in papers that are a century old. About the only time that mistakes aren't found given enough time is when a paper is ignored and no one looks at it, in which case an unread paper with errors isn't much of a problem.

        • by TrekkieGod ( 627867 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @11:07AM (#57642674) Homepage Journal

          Exactly. The only thing I'd like to add is a slight comment on this one sentence:

          If you think Peer review catches mistakes then you need to learn more about peer review because that's not what it does.

          To be fair, it does. The problem here is the assumption that peer review refers only to the reviewers who look at unpublished manuscripts before accepting them for publication. That's the first level of it, but it's only going to catch the most obvious issues with methodology, lack of sufficient literature review, conclusions that aren't well supported by provided data, etc. It's what you get when somebody in your basic field spends an hour reading your paper.

          The bulk of peer review happens after the fact. The paper is published, it's read by a much larger pool of scientists in the field, many with competing theories that can offer a different viewpoint and analysis. Other research groups attempt to reproduce any experiments and can publish confirmation or inability to reproduce, etc.

          It doesn't always go this smoothly: A lot of papers end up not getting published in prestigious journals like Nature, so not enough eyes look at every paper. Journals have a bias against negative results, so it's harder to publish papers that just reproduces somebody else's work and confirms they got the same result (unless it's a hot topic and/or controversial result), so not as much work gets done in that area as there should be done. That said, the basic process is sound, and the thing to take away from stories like these isn't, "climate scientists are wrong." It's, "climate scientists are the ones that point out when they are wrong after further review, because that's what scientists do. They're not protecting an agenda, and they're constantly looking for errors in each others' work."

      • Nature is a peer reviewed publication. So, there were multiple, independent levels of error. That's not how it's supposed to work.

        No, this is how science works-- this is the perfect exemplar of science working correctly. The researchers published their results, they found errors, they acknowledged the errors and published the correction.

        Kudos to them. Yes, it would be wonderful if scientists never made errors in the first place, but it turns out that science is done by humans, and humans make errors. The way science works is to acknowledge the errors: that is what makes it science.

        • by HornWumpus ( 783565 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @11:23AM (#57642848)

          The error was _not_ found by a 'climate scientist'.

          From TFA.

          However, not long after publication, an independent Britain-based researcher named Nicholas Lewis published a lengthy blog post saying he had found a “major problem” with the research.

          Lewis added that he tends “to read a large number of papers, and, having a mathematics as well as a physics background, I tend to look at them quite carefully, and see if they make sense. And where they don’t make sense — with this one, it’s fairly obvious it didn’t make sense — I look into them more deeply.”

          Alarmists have repeatedly told me that non-climate scientist should shut the fuck up. Kudos to the journal and those of the authors that accept the mistake, but don't pretend that they found it themselves or that they are all accepting that they made an error.

          Yes, I RTFA....Hangs head in shame.

          • by munch117 ( 214551 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @12:08PM (#57643232)

            The error was _not_ found by a 'climate scientist'.

            He certainly styles himself as such. Nicholas Lewis, an independent Climate Science Researcher, based in the UK. Quoting https://www.nicholaslewis.org/ [nicholaslewis.org].

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by HornWumpus ( 783565 )

              So what? He is exactly the kind of 'unqualified outsider' that is repeatedly told to shut the fuck up by 'real climate scientists'.

        • it turns out that science is done by humans, and humans make errors

          In fact, that's the reason why we need peer-reviewed science. If there were no errors, we could produce science by means oracles right off pronouncing perfectly accurate theorems.

      • by dcw3 ( 649211 )

        Oh please google peer review problems before genuflecting to it as a be all, end all. There are numerous articles by respected sources available.

        For those too lazy to do so, the short answer is that much of what would ideally be peer reviewed just doesn't happen. The basic reason is that there's no money/glory in doing peer review. The people you'd want to be doing the reviewing are too busy doing their own science, and getting that published. Who's going to pay you to double check someone else's work..

      • by hey! ( 33014 )

        OK: propose a process that would infallibly prevent errors from ever being published? What would that even look like?

        Errors routinely get published in peer reviewed papers, even in prominent journals. How do we know this? Because they get caught by other scientists, usually pretty quickly. Scientists are world champion contrarians, and they're continually finding flaws in each others' work. Peer review is just the preliminary round of the pile-on.

        This is why you should not pay too much attention to stud

      • Peer review is about reviewing the articles, the methodology, etc. It is not fool proof which is why you wait for later papers that help to improve the knowledge. Few papers stand on their own. Many of them just present evidence and are intended to encourage others to use that evidence or add to it.

        If you wait until 100% certainty of conclusions before any paper is published then no papers will ever be published.

    • by Layzej ( 1976930 )
      Some folks in the previous thread were concerned that that if the paper challenged the consensus then maybe we don't know nuffin'. For example the following can be read with /sarc tags on:

      This must have been the last remaining sampling error and from now on the science is settled.

      As it turns out there is good reason to reserve judgement on any paper that challenges the consensus. A consensus that is built upon a consilience of evidence cannot be overturned by a single contrary paper.

      • consilience

        I just learned a new word that's actually interesting and useful; thanks.

    • by anegg ( 1390659 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @10:35AM (#57642412)
      And, unfortunately, the subtle nuances of this correction may get lost in a "they had to withdraw their claims" discussion. If I understand what I read, the errors were in calculating the uncertainty present in their results, with more uncertainty being present than originally reported. This doesn't mean they were wrong and need to go back to the beginning, just that they can't be as certain that they were right. Which should engender more work to reduce the uncertainty. Which could reduce the uncertainty, or identify other factors at work that expand their model and result in a better overall explanation of the observations. That's science.
    • This is what science does. People find something and publish the results for everyone to look at. If there is something wrong, other people point it out, and they go back to the drawing board.

      (A) You can only do that if you have the data to question, which climate "scientists" are not always forthcoming with, or have run through magical adjustment algorithms you cannot have or question.

      (B) Anyone questioning the ocean-scare claims last week on Slashdot was called a denier - when all along it turns out they

      • This is what science does. People find something and publish the results for everyone to look at. If there is something wrong, other people point it out, and they go back to the drawing board.

        (A) You can only do that if you have the data to question, which climate "scientists" are not always forthcoming with

        To the contrary. All of the data is made publicaly available, as well as all of the computer codes.

        or have run through magical adjustment algorithms you cannot have or question.

        And all of the data adjustments are explained in detail, the reasons for data analysis explained, the codes made available, and the raw data available so you can do your own data analysis if you want. And at least five different groups on three continents do exactly that.

        • Boldly asserted lies.

          Show us the link to the raw 'hockey stick data'. The best you will find are attempts to reconstruct it.

          Show us the link to the adjusted historical data. The best you will find is records of previous years getting colder as time rolls forward.

          • Show us the link to the raw 'hockey stick data'.

            Which one ? Can you provide a direct link to the paper ?

          • Easy. 'Hockey stick data' is at https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/... [uea.ac.uk] You will find raw station data at https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/h... [metoffice.gov.uk]

            Like Geoffrey said, all the data is available. Your lack of searching doesn't mean it isn't there.

            • Those are the proxies. They never show how they got those from the raw data. You post links to both, but nobody can show how they got from 2 to 1.

              Outsiders have attempted to redo Mann's work and have posted a reconstruction that produces similar results. Those reconstructions show lots of finagling.

              • They never show how they got those from the raw data. You post links to both, but nobody can show how they got from 2 to 1.

                And you have read all the papers ?

    • by SlaveToTheGrind ( 546262 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @10:58AM (#57642592)

      This is how science is supposed to work; although, ideally, the errors are caught prior to publication - the process still worked correctly.

      The problem isn't the science per se -- it's how hard it is to unring the bell outside the scientific community. The media, and therefore the public, got whipped into a hot lather over the initial study. Google "oceans warming faster than anticipated" (even in quotes) to see how pervasively it spread in both the press and social media.

      I'm quite comfortable the retraction will not be trumpeted a fraction as loudly, and even if it were, that a large percentage of people who read the initial headlines and ran around screaming bloody murder would largely stay silent.

      That's how the news cycle works (and it's well understood to work that way), and thus a supposedly reputable journal racing to publication with shoddy work like this is grossly negligent at best.

      • This! This is a phenomenon I've noticed happen quite often in social, and even professional media at times, lately.
        I've dubbed it PNP, for "Persistence of Negative Perception". I think it's a very real thing and deserves it's own term.
        Sometimes we'll see a news article (a badly biased, or hastily researched one), but more oftentimes, a Tweet, fueled by emotion and bias, which purports some event or claim which turns out ultimately to be false or badly flawed in accuracy. This initial, negative Tweet might

    • This does not compute.

      I thought all the "scientists" were in a huge conspiracy to promote their false "global warming" agenda.

    • This is what science does. People find something and publish the results for everyone to look at. If there is something wrong, other people point it out, and they go back to the drawing board.

      This is how science is supposed to work; although, ideally, the errors are caught prior to publication - the process still worked correctly.

      I assume CNN will have hours about it this evening?

  • by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @09:45AM (#57642094)
    >> Two weeks after the high-profile study was published in the journal Nature, its authors have submitted corrections to the publication.

    Quit trying to time your studies around US election dates and we'll all be better off. (E.g. many informed people already mostly ignore employment and GCP numbers because they always expect significant corrections to the just-announced figures just around the corner.)
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Quit trying to time your studies around US election dates and we'll all be better off.

      Since this is science we're talking about: Correlation does not imply causation.

    • by hey! ( 33014 )

      Oh, for pete's sake. Nature is a British journal; it's editor is a British biomedical researcher. The study's lead author is a French oceanographer working at an American university.

      It's conspiracy theory thinking to believe this paper was somehow timed to coincide with the US election. How is that supposed to work exactly? Somebody who doesn't believe in global warming is going to have his mind changed because of a letter published in Nature?

      Scientists do sometimes rush, but what they're worried about

  • Expedited results (Score:4, Interesting)

    by OffTheLip ( 636691 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @09:46AM (#57642100)

    main lesson is that you work as fast as you can to fix mistakes

    Same argument could be made for rushing out findings, perhaps under pressure?

    • As though an "invisible hand" shoves people into publishing early and often.
    • Who said anything about rushing? That's an assumption you're making because a mistake has been made. Rushing leads to mistakes, but not all mistakes are caused by rushing.

  • by Crashmarik ( 635988 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @09:58AM (#57642162)

    There's one hell of a lot of slashtards that are wishing comments could be deleted today.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Interesting that you default to people wanting to delete their comments rather than say simply changing their view given new information and standing by their original comment given the information they had at the time.

  • by tmshort ( 1097127 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @10:02AM (#57642182)

    ...be used by Client Change/Science Deniers "to prove" that it's just a big hoax and a big conspiracy...

  • OMG! Scientists are all lairs, trying to make billions of dollars for themselves. They were just caught lying again. Climate change is Fake News!

    I think that captures a good portion of the posts we'll see here. The truth is that the IPCC studies are summaries of tens of thousands of studies [wikipedia.org], and they all point to the same problem and the same cause and the same predictions. Humankind is still largely fucked, whether this one researcher miscalculated uncertainty in this one study or not.
  • I am shocked that a paper got published in Nature with faulty uncertainty analysis.
  • That's the basic type of mistake they made with this one.

  • I am utterly shocked that an alarmist climate prediction would be made based on bad science. Shocked. What is this world coming to? So crazy. I've never even heard of such a thing. Everyone knows there is scientific consensus on this. It's solved science. I don't even understand why scientists still study climate since the science is so God damned settled.

    Shocked...

  • that Manbearpig isn't real [rare.us]. I for one am relieved.
  • Given the political and public spotlight on climate science, researchers need to be extra careful and make sure their work is rigorous.

    Why was this mistake made? Was there a rush to publish and people worked quickly?

    Since this is such a (incorrectly) controversial area, instances like this linger in the zeitgeist.

    Years from now, internet trolls and conspiracy theorists will point back to this one instance as an example of how climate science is wrong, benignly mistaken, or at worst, maliciously disingenuou

    • by DogDude ( 805747 )
      Internet trolls and conspiracy theorists won't stop. Science makes mistakes. It doesn't matter if those groups can't or won't understand that.
    • Given the political and public spotlight on climate science, researchers need to be extra careful and make sure their work is rigorous.

      Yes, it would be nice if all scientists were perfect and nobody made mistakes ever. In the real world, however, the way science works is that scientists are supposed to acknowledge it when they find errors, and correct the error. Which is what they did.

      Why was this mistake made? Was there a rush to publish and people worked quickly?

      The error was apparently in the uncertainty analysis. Uncertainty analyses turn out to be hard to do.

  • May I ask all those who gleefully go about "stupid scientists that keep on correcting themselves", "climate change conspiracy" and so on...

    Do you know of any other system of acquiring knowledge about the world that is willing to disclose all its results and methods and corrects itself in the face of facts? Gazillion times. Until what remains IS the truth or the closest model to reality there can be. Do you know of any other system that has produced anything even remotely as useful as science?

    WELL, DO YOU?

    Fe

    • As much as Science has tried to divorce itself from Philosophy, it is still a subset of it as Natural Philosophy. It is a mistake for Science to ignore it as the mistakes it keeps making are very well covered by it. Climate Change is plagued with people utilizing Appeals to Authority, "its right because this expert said so," Ad Populum (consensus), and Ad Hom with Name calling dissenting opinions. All of it well-covered ground by Greek Philosophy. The desire by Scientists for Science to become greater has o
  • Just to save time and nip the inevitable anti-climate-change nonsense in the bud...

    Nobody is disputing that the oceans are heating up. This is an argument over the details.

    By comparison, it's like saying that the earth isn't spherical, which is correct. But the reason this is correct is not because the flat-earthers are right. The reason is that the earth is slightly egg-shaped. It is still for all intents and purposes, spherical. It's just a question of how specific you need to be.

A committee takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom. -- Parkinson

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