"We Really Muffed" It: Scientist Admits Error in Hyped Global Warming Study

We Really Muffed It: Scientist Admits Error in Hyped Global Warming Study

The co-author of a much-hyped, peer-reviewed, alarmist paper claiming to have found a huge, unexpected build-up of global warming heat in the oceans has admitted: “We really muffed” the calculations. 

According to the paper by Laure Resplandy et al, published this month in the prestigious journal Nature, a lot of the missing heat from global warming — 60 percent more than hitherto thought — has been absorbed by the oceans. 

Naturally, this shocking discovery caused much excitement across mainstream media and was widely reported by environmental correspondents as proof that the global warming crisis was more serious than evah. 

However, their exultant doom-mongering has been shortlived. An independent analyst, Nic Lewis, examined the paper and quickly spotted it was based on flawed math. As the Global Warming Policy Forum reported: Independent climate scientist Nicholas Lewis has uncovered a major error in a recent scientific paper that was given blanket coverage in the English-speaking media. 

The paper, written by a team led by Princeton oceanographer Laure Resplandy, claimed that the oceans have been warming faster than previously thought. It was announced, in news outlets including the BBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post and Scientific American that this meant that the Earth may warm even faster than currently estimated. 

However Lewis, who has authored several peer-reviewed papers on the question of climate sensitivity and has worked with some of the world’s leading climate scientists, has found that the warming trend in the Resplandy paper differs from that calculated from the underlying data included with the paper. 

“If you calculate the trend correctly, the warming rate is not worse than we thought – it’s very much in line with previous estimates,” says Lewis. In fact, says Lewis, some of the other claims made in the paper and reported by the media, are wrong too. 

“Their claims about the effect of faster ocean warming on estimates of climate sensitivity (and hence future global warming) and carbon budgets are just incorrect anyway, but that’s a moot point now we know that about their calculation error”. 

Now, one of the paper’s co-authors, Ralph Keeling has gamely fessed up to the error — and hinted that this effectively invalidates the paper: 

“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 just 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 actually a much larger margin of error in the findings, which means researchers can weigh in with less certainty than they thought. 

“I accept responsibility for what happened because it’s my role to make sure that those kind of details got conveyed,” Keeling said.