Researchers cited inaccurate data in a study on the speed of global warming – Technology News, Firstpost

France Media Agency
Nov 24, 2018 6:22 pm EST

November 1st AFP have joined media outlets around the world to cover the publication of a major scientific document warning that the warming of our oceans was much faster than expected.

The study was undertaken by some of the world's leading climate scientists, using state-of-the-art peer-reviewed modeling systems, and has appeared in one of the most prestigious academic journals.

There was just one problem: it was wrong.

Posted in Nature, the article from researchers at the University of California at San Diego and Princeton revealed that ocean temperatures have warmed by 60% more than current estimates.

They concluded without fear that even the most ambitious reductions foreseen in the global plan for the prevention of climate disasters should be further reduced by 25%.

Shortly after its release, an independent climatologist – a scientist who has repeatedly expressed skepticism about the consensus that human behavior is causing global warming – has spotted an error in the study. ;analysis. Nature the maths of paper.

"After correction, the … results do not suggest a greater increase in the calorific content of the ocean than we previously thought," Nicolas Lewis written on his Climate science Blog.

"A few hours of analysis and calculations were enough to uncover seemingly serious (but surely fortuitous) errors in the underlying calculations.

"It is very important that the media who have undeniably criticized the newspaper's findings corrects the facts as well, but it may be too much to hope for," he added.

With the rectified calculation, the authors quickly realized that they had made a mistake.

The new results offer a much wider range of possibilities for increasing the temperature of the ocean – between 10 and 70%: even hotter, but making the study vague, even for the sometimes unrecognizable science of climate modeling.

"We quickly realized that our calculations were incorrectly dealing with systematic errors in O2 measurements as there were random errors in the propagation of errors," wrote the author. Author Ralph Keeling on climatehome.org.

"We really erased the margins of error," he told the San Diego Tribune.

Climate hoax

The correction has pushed some climate deniers to reject the conspiracy theory that human-caused global warming is invented.

Some Twitter users suggested that the study was funded by the Democrats, that man-made global warming had been invented by former presidential hopeful Al Gore so that he could buy a house, and that decades of factual research on the phenomenon constituted a "pseudoscience".

But scientists have rallied around the authors, pointing out that the process surrounding the Nature The publication and correction of the paper was, in fact, how scientific research is supposed to work.

"Science is a human enterprise and therefore imperfect, and the important thing is that the results are examined and reproduced by others, so that we can evaluate what is robust and what is not. it's not, "said Gavin A. Schmidt, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Sciences. at NASA, said AFP.

"Thousands of scientists (and other interested people) have been studying current climate change, and our understanding of this phenomenon is quite solid," he said.

Since AFP has since corrected its coverage of the study, its updated findings are included in the report for future reports on global warming.

Peter Frumhoff, head of climate research at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the correction of ocean study was "a beautiful thing".

"The quick and transparent recognition and correction of inadvertent mistakes in scientific articles is at the heart of what separates science from dogma," he said. AFP.

"This underscores our confidence in the robustness of consensual scientific findings, based on thousands of independent studies, on man-made climate change."