On November 1, AFP joined news outlets around the world in covering the release of a major academic paper warning that our oceans were warming dramatically quicker than previously thought.
The study was undertaken by some of the world’s most pre-eminent climate scientists, using state-of-the-art modelling systems reviewed by their peers, and appeared in Nature, one of the most prestigious academic journals.
There was just one problem: it was wrong.
The paper by researchers from the University of California San Diego and Princeton found that ocean temperatures had warmed 60% more than current estimates.
They concluded, with no small sense of alarm, that even the most ambitious emission cuts laid out in the global plan to prevent climate disaster would need to be slashed again by another 25%.
Soon after publication, an independent climate scientist spotted an error in the Nature paper’s maths.
“After correction, the... results do not suggest a larger increase in ocean heat content than previously thought,” Nicolas Lewis wrote on his Climate Science blog.
With the rectified calculation, the authors quickly realised they had made a mistake.
The new results had a far larger range of possibilities in ocean temperature increases — between 10 and 70%: still warmer, but rendering the study vague even for the sometimes unknowable science of climate modelling.
“We quickly realised that our calculations incorrectly treated systematic errors in the O2 measurements as if they were random errors in the error propagation,” author Ralph Keeling wrote on climatehome.org.
The correction prompted some climate deniers to wheel out the conspiracy theory that manmade global warming is made up.
Scientists have rallied round the authors, pointing out that the process surrounding the Nature paper’s publication and correction was, really, how scientific research is supposed to work.