One of the world’s most respected scientific journals, Nature, has asked researchers to retract an article on ocean warming and its link to changes in atmospheric O2 and CO2 composition, citing systematic errors in the study almost a year after it was initially published.
The scientific team pointed to the conclusions by mathematician and persistent critic of climate models Nicholas Lewis, who was the first one to raise doubts that the findings of the study could be supported because of what he described as "serious (but surely inadvertent) errors in the underlying calculations” that defined the amount of uncertainty.
“We realized that our reported uncertainties were underestimated owing to our treatment of certain systematic errors as random errors. In addition, we became aware of several smaller issues in our analysis of uncertainty”, the authors of the study, led by Princeton University Professor Laure Resplandy, stated in a retraction note.
They explained that even though they corrected the paper, which did not “substantially change the central estimate of ocean warming”, they also acknowledged that “it weakened implications for an upward revision of ocean warming and climate sensitivity”.
However, they still insisted that their method remains valid and promised to publish the revised paper with the corrected uncertainties in another journal.
Shortly after the paper was published, it prompted alarmed reactions in the international media who distributed the worrying results of the study in question, stating that the world ocean was absorbing 60% more heat than was earlier estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This could impact the way our climate is changing and our planet is warming.
Resplandy and her colleagues used a new method and assessed the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. They decided to use the data to measure ocean temperatures globally from 1991 until today, based on the fact that the warmer the sea gets, the more carbon dioxide and oxygen it releases into the air.
"When the ocean warms, the amount of these gases that the ocean is able to hold goes down. So what we measured was the amount lost by the oceans, and then we can calculate how much warming we need to explain that change in gases,” Dr Laure Resplandy explained at the time.
