Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Are The Oceans Warming?

Maybe, maybe not:
Researchers with UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Princeton University recently walked back scientific findings published last month that showed oceans have been heating up dramatically faster than previously thought as a result of climate change.

In a paper published Oct. 31 in the journal Nature, researchers found that ocean temperatures had warmed 60 percent more than outlined by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

However, the conclusion came under scrutiny after mathematician Nic Lewis, a critic of the scientific consensus around human-induced warming, posted a critique of the paper on the blog of Judith Curry, another well-known critic.

“The findings of the ... 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. “Despite this, a quick review of the first page of the paper was sufficient to raise doubts as to the accuracy of its results.”

Co-author Ralph Keeling, climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, took full blame and thanked Lewis for alerting him to the mistake.
At least they didn't double down after being caught, a la East Anglia.

9 comments:

  1. Anonymous3:51 AM

    Yes, the oceans are warming. That was never, ever in any doubt by anyone doing science. Please read the article you do breathlessly linked to. All the words.

    The error was in the size of the error bars. And the authors are working to revise their findings to reflect as much. Science is not broken. Climate change is real.

    And yes, the oceans are warming.

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  2. The error is acknowledged to be somewhere between 10 and 70%, enough to make the conclusions of this report meaningless--so say the report's authors, who have accepted responsibility are are reworking the report so that it's accurate.

    *Then* it's science.

    BTW, I don't know that anyone argues that the climate isn't changing. We argue over what's causing it, your strawman argument notwithstanding. Since climate has *always* changed....

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  3. Anonymous4:19 PM

    Human activity is destabilizing the climate. No one doing actual climate science has doubted that since the last time Big Head Todd and the Monsters charted a hit record.

    Retired physicists and mathematicians grinding Cold War political axes inhabit their own secluded echo chambers, and are largely ignored by the working science community.

    A math error in a single study does not invalidate the settled science of climate change. Nor does it raise any doubt as to whether or not the oceans are warming. The quibble is over the warming rate, not the warming fact.

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  4. By the way, are you tired of the breathless apocalyptic doom yet? If you're not sure what I mean, see here:
    https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/313177/

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  5. Anonymous6:13 AM

    For Ralph Keeling's reply to the event you can go to realclimate.org. It a bit of a technical site. Keeling does thank Nicholas Lewis for alerting him to the error. It is what real scientists do.

    By the way, the Gulf of Maine up here is warming rapidly and is causing all kinds of havoc with the ecosystem. Anyone interested can just google gulf of maine warming.

    Richard the liberal

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  6. The question is whether or not *man* is causing this. As we've seen such patterns of warming and cooling throughout recorded history, I'm not going to ditch my (non-existent) SUV.

    I always like to note the types of vehicles the global warming priests drive. And how often and how far they travel for pleasure, sometimes just to take pictures.

    To paraphrase the Instapundit: (Perhaps) I'll act like it's a crisis when the people who tell me it's a crisis act like it's a crisis.

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  7. Anonymous7:05 PM

    The responsibility for reducing carbon emissions is shared by all. I'm sure you give a thumb's up and an ear-to-=ear to every Prius driver you encounter. But protecting climate stability is not the burden of any specific individual. It is the burden of society and how it chooses to regulate itself.

    Nobody gets to freeload on this. (You so quickly acclimated to coworkers paying for negotiators to get you a great contract. You do get to freeload on that if you can do and sleep at night.) But limiting carbon emissions requires solutions on a grander scale. Trump's US has decided to cede leadership to other nations on this matter.

    And it won't work without the US leadership. Grand scheme: human activity will continue to destabilize the climate. (There is ample evidence for climate change being anthropogenic, but you are immune to factual evidence.) Insurance companies will look to limit climate-related claims. They will battle fossil-fuel interests on this. But they will lose.

    Just as the Romans continued to use lead heavily even after they knew it was toxic, we will choose to destabilize the climate knowing full well what we're doing.

    The consequences will unfold slowly, but they will unfold. The Sixth Extinction has already begun. It will be an academic exercise to ponder which species will survive it. The frog realizes too late that the water is bound to boil.

    In the meantime, we all get to drive whatever vehicle we choose. Freedom! Unless you oppose that kind of thing. With luck, you and I will be gone before the worst of it hits. We will be cast as demons by future generations who will have to live with the consequences we lay upon them. They will know us for our collective policies, not for our individual vehicle preferences.

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  8. You are a heathen. You are denier. You must get your mind right. You must repent. Sell your house, liquidate all your assets and send a check to the ALGORE so you can get his forgiveness.

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  9. Oh, "anonymous", just tell me what kind of vehicle you drive. After you do that, I'll shoot down all your other points. But it wouldn't be any fun until you tell me what kind of vehicle you drive. Because if you're not going to walk the walk...in fact, do you walk anywhere? Anywhere?

    ReplyDelete