November 14, 2018

"Scientists behind a major study that claimed the Earth's oceans are warming faster than previously thought now say their work contained inadvertent errors..."

"... that made their conclusions seem more certain than they actually are. Two weeks after the high-profile study was published in the journal Nature, its authors have submitted corrections to the publication. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography, home to several of the researchers involved, also noted the problems in the scientists' work and corrected a news release on its website, which previously had asserted that the study detailed how the Earth’s oceans 'have absorbed 60 percent more heat than previously thought.'... The central conclusion of the study... is in line with other studies that have drawn similar conclusions...."

WaPo reports. 

I wonder how much overstatement of certain happens because of a pull to see things "in line with other studies that have drawn similar conclusions." Can someone study that — in an unbiased, scientific way?

ADDED: The most-liked comments at WaPo are in line with other WaPo most-liked comments and therefore exactly what I expected.

106 comments:

Fritz said...

Confirmation bias strikes again.

rhhardin said...

Climate science is peer reviewed by climate scientists, to climate science standards.

Curiosity is no longer a motivation.

Wince said...

Can someone study that — in an unbiased, scientific way?

True, inadvertent error should be random. If it trends in one direction, it's bias.

Like vote counting in Broward County.

Gahrie said...

Civilization did not cause global warming, global warming caused civilization.

Big Mike said...

"Inadvertent" my ass!

IMAO all climate so-called science since Michael Mann's thoroughly debunked hockey stick needs to be published exclusively in "The Journal of Irreproducible Results."

JackWayne said...

Paul Durack, a research scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said that promptly acknowledging the errors in the study “is the right approach in the interests of transparency.”
But he added in an email, “This study, although there are additional questions that are arising now, confirms the long known result that the oceans have been warming over the observed record, and the rate of warming has been increasing,” he said.

“....although there are additional questions that are arising now...”

You buried the lede.

tim in vermont said...

Yeah, this error was noticed by a "denialist" over on Judith Curry's blog. I am kind of surprised they gave any air time to the correction, which is that the study doesn't change anything.

Skepticism is the basis of scientific progress.

Dave D said...

That's a great journal Mike. I haven't seen one in years, but it is really funny!

rightguy said...

I think the most important cause of global warming is the sun.

Bob Boyd said...

"Skepticism is the basis of scientific progress."

Funding is the basis of scientific progress.

Dave Begley said...

Don't even call it science. It is all predictions about events in the distant future based upon flawed assumptions and corrupt data.

I predict that Creighton will win the Men's Division 1 basketball championship in 2069. I won't be around to see it, so why not predict it now?

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

I love how those of us insisting on verifiable, repeatable, transparent scientific processes are “the nut jobs” in this scenario. People who simply accept what their experts tell them, no matter how much the evidence contradicts it, are the smug smart people. Maybe if the “studies” had been open and transparent all along they would not have “felt” pushed to exaggerate their findings. What other scientific endeavors are being subjugated to politics like climate sciences? Any? Maybe food research?

Fernandinande said...

"It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that." -- Feynman

tim in vermont said...

Like the hockey stick, knocked down by a blogger with qualifications but not a perch in the politically approved scientific community.

https://judithcurry.com/2018/11/06/a-major-problem-with-the-resplandy-et-al-ocean-heat-uptake-paper/

He said that it smelled funny from the first page but took him several hours to work out the math. When peer review bans skeptical voices, this is what you get.

robother said...

Mistakes get made, in reaching for scientific conclusions beyond what data support. But peer review is there to catch them. The rigor of peer review in climate science is what seems particularly suspect. So many mistakes not caught until years later, all make in the same direction.

Gahrie said...

Isn't the Mann V Steyn case still active?

tim in vermont said...

You can reproduce the hockey stick, the problem is that you can do it with any randomly generated data, or even other data sets, as long as it's autocorrolated, each number depends slightly on the last.

Mann insisted that climate in each year was not connected to the previous year until CO2 introduced a bias. It's called assuming what you are trying to prove.

Xmas said...

I like to go with Always Sunny on this:

Science is a liar...Sometimes

tim in vermont said...

My favorite was when they insisted that they weren't hiding a decline in the widely touted hockey stick graph even as the literature was filling with papers on "the divergence problem." A.K.A the decline. The line that showed it was buried and of a color that made it almost invisible. They said that it was an artifact of the graphing software.

They just trash their own credibility, but count on the media to cover for them.

AllenS said...

One thing is certain, it's a lot warmer than it was when we had glaciers here. That's a good thing.

MikeR said...

Good for them. The article mentions Nic Lewis, who pointed out the errors (https://judithcurry.com/2018/11/07/resplandy-et-al-part-2-regression-in-the-presence-of-trend-and-scale-systematic-errors/), but doesn't mention that he is one of those "nut jobs" - a climate skeptic who believes in AGW but also believes that the statistics involved has been badly done from the start. He is one of the most influential scientists on the skeptical side, who has published a number of important peer-reviewed articles (quoted in the IPCC report, some together with Judith Curry) that claim to demonstrate that climate sensitivity is way over on the lower side of IPCC estimates. 1.5 degrees instead of 3, something like that. According to him, meeting the Kyoto accords doesn't require any mitigation at all.
He represents one side of a very big argument in climate science that isn't much report: Exactly how much will temperature go up if CO2 doubles? No one knows; the latest IPCC AR5 report gives a "likely" range of 1.5 to 4.5 degrees - a factor of three! It's a hard problem, but Nic Lewis is one of the reasons they included 1.5.

sparrow said...

There is a strong confirmation bias in science and competition to get the glory of a high profile paper in a top journal like Nature. As a result some of the worst frauds are found in the best journals. Further Nature has been pushing he climate change narrative for a long while. The climate field is tainted with hyperbole, measurements error, opaque models, and politics. I've seen modest improvement in the last few years given the efforts of Curry and others to expose problems.

rhhardin said...

Judith Curry is okay, and a force for skeptical good by way of having immunity as a girl, but she still believes climate science is a science instead of a horoscope system.

They do really accurate measurements in astrology, just like a scientist does, but the interpretation is off the wall.

In both cases the interpreted system is too complicated to do science on.

tcrosse said...

Blogger robother said...
Mistakes get made, in reaching for scientific conclusions beyond what data support.


Hey, those Mistakes don't make themselves.

MikeR said...

"In both cases the interpreted system is too complicated to do science on." I think that's an overstatement. Curry has a private company that does some of the best weather prediction in the world. The question is, how far can you push it? The system is chaotic, but does that mean that nothing at all can be said long-term?
But it is really hard. If all you think you can predict is overall average global temperature, you get about one new data point per month! Imagine how long it takes to test anything. They can try back-fitting the past, but there isn't much to go on. It got somewhat warmer in the last century...

JPS said...

"Inadvertent errors that made their conclusions seem more certain than they are" is an occupational hazard in climate science.

There is a lot of incentive to publish the study that makes headlines in the non-scientific press. I will once again insist, most of these people are honestly and seriously trying to get it right. But when errors that say we have less of a problem than we thought immediately trip your BS detector, and errors that say it's worse than we thought don't, there will be some careful selection going on (even if inadvertent). See also the excellent Feynman quote from Fernandistein above.

Ralph L said...

I wonder how much overstatement of certain happens because of a pull to see things

I'm 95% confident this would sound better with "certainty."

If the mistakes were in the other direction, I'd say this is a publicity stunt.

rhhardin said...

An example what actcual science looked like in geophysical physics before the climate science fad

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2416238?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

A guy notices that long length wind-driven sea waves grow faster in reality than their linear growth rate says they should, and asks what could be happening. He suggests a maser-like system, with fast-growing short waves breaking preferentially at the tops of long waves and transferring their momentum to the long wave.

No alarm, just curiosity and imagination.

mandrewa said...

This is less than the full truth. It is not just that they greatly underestimated the uncertainty of their results, it also that they their result is wrong.

The Washington Post article actually says that but in so much a way that few people are going to get it.

Quote: “So far as I can see, their method vastly underestimates the uncertainty,” Lewis said in an interview Tuesday, “as well as biasing up significantly, nearly 30 percent, the central estimate.”

It's the second part of that statement, "biasing up significantly, nearly 30 percent," that means that: No, the ocean is not warming more than previously was believed.

The authors of the paper deserve a great deal of credit for acknowledging their errors after it was pointed by Nic Lewis. This is a huge, huge improvement over Michael Mann and company.

The Washington Post also deserves credit for publishing this retraction.

But at the same time it's disappointing they aren't really telling the whole truth. And maybe it's that the journalists don't get it. That's possible. It is complicated.

In reality there is no evidence from this corrected study that the oceans have absorbed more heat than previously believed.

MikeR said...

India moving away from coal. https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2018/01/30/india-coal-power-is-about-to-crash-65-of-existing-coal-costs-more-than-new-wind-and-solar/#59b2b7ae4c0f
Game-changer. If this is happening now, there is absolutely no need for mitigation.

rhhardin said...

Weather prediction works because the atmosphere over short times is a 2D system. It stops being 2D in the time it takes vortices to kink, and that's about the limit of weather forecasting. 3D fluids go to shorter and shorter scales; 2D fluids do not. You can solve the latter but not the former.

FIDO said...

Perhaps it is confirmation bias on my part, but I keep hearing these reports about how things just aren't getting as hot as they thought it would

To wit, some recent measurements were on the very lowest of the IPCC of prior reports predictions. Now the oceans are cooler than expected. Mann can't find all that heat that his models project.

I wonder how many glaciers it would take for WaPo readers to be buried under before they start asking some hard questions.

FIDO said...

They didn't hide the decline. Good for them

Matt Sablan said...

Can we say that their study was in the dog park?

MacMacConnell said...

Bob Boyd said...
"Skepticism is the basis of scientific progress."

"Funding is the basis of scientific progress."

Because we all know there was absolutely no scientific progress in the USA prior to FDR.

mandrewa said...

The essential error can be seen by people that don't understand most of this, which is pretty much everyone.

The essential error is that they got the trend wrong.

If you look at the first figure in this essay, Fig. 1,

https://judithcurry.com/2018/11/06/a-major-problem-with-the-resplandy-et-al-ocean-heat-uptake-paper/

You can see that the trend of the paper published in Nature does not match with the data.

Since that error is so obvious it becomes a mystery how the authors ever missed this.

It's a spectacular example of confirmation bias. People want to see something. They believe something and they ignore evidence to the contrary.

It's a constant reoccurring problem with human reasoning. But the number of people that had to not see this, for this paper to get published, is amazing.

gspencer said...

"its authors have submitted corrections to the publication"

It's okay to finally admit that you lefties don't know the fk you're pretending to talk about.

Matt Sablan said...

Thinking Fast and Slow, and another book, I think it is called How Not to Be Wrong, have really helped me avoid these sorts of mental missteps.

But, so has general proofreading.

tim in vermont said...

I got a kick out of how quickly they abandoned the findings of something like 2,000 underwater temperature drones which report temps down to 2,000 meters and surface and report to satellites, and have been running for a decade because they liked this answer better.

But "skeptics pounce" will be the take.

Dave D said...

"No alarm, just curiosity and imagination."

And, most importantly, no new redistribution of wealth....er... tax to help pay for a yet-to-be discovered "fix" to the problem.

Leland said...

Now I remember this theory. In order to explain the lack of atmospheric warming that Arrhenius equation says should exists; the notion is the ocean is absorbing all the excess heat and sort of hiding it.

Since we are discussing climate change; is anyone interested in a class action suit against the State of California for mismanaging their forest resources resulting in a fire that has released thousands of tons of green house gases into the atmosphere. California's pollution is so great, it can be seen from space. That excess GHG will increase the ocean temperature even more resulting in stronger hurricanes that will impact the Gulf Coast. California needs to pay.

tim in vermont said...

At some point a moment may come, as it did in Christendom during the plague when they realized that saint's bones don't really protect you. They will stop worshipping their models one funeral at a time.

ga6 said...

All hands on deck!! Now repeat after me: Grant Money, Grant Money, Grant money, Keep the Phony Jobs, Keep the Phony Jobs, Keep the Phony Jobs..

Sam's Hideout said...

In physics, Millikan first accurately measured the charge of an electron. However the modern accepted value is somewhat higher. Feynman noted that later measurements crept higher and higher over time and suggested that people respected Millikan's work so much that when their own measurement came in higher they would scrutinize their equipment and methods for possible sources of error while if their number was close they wouldn't search so hard.

Birkel said...

Facts may have been inaccurate...

That means they were not facts, genius WaPo readers.

PB said...

They isn't much money in research that concludes there's no problem.

chuckR said...

"The central conclusion of the study... is in line with other studies that have drawn similar conclusions...."

So there are other studies that need critical review? Where, oh, where, WAPO, are these studies? Even if your scriveners can't understand them, can they at least cite them?

Bob Boyd said...

"Because we all know there was absolutely no scientific progress in the USA prior to FDR."

I understand what tim in vermont meant and he's right, of course. But so am I.
Why does so much "climate science" get done these days? Because that's what gets funding.
And that's what gets funding because it serves a political agenda.
I believe everything from the hypotheses to the published conclusions of climate studies are affected by the desire to get funded and keep getting funded. Scientists are not immune to human foibles.

cubanbob said...

I'm no scientist but it would seem to me that if the oceans were absorbing all that extra heat would be seeing the effects of that by now in the form of expanding cloud coverage and increases in rainfall.

John henry said...

There are a lot of problems with the historical record. Not The least of them is how few measurements we have of the 90 percent of oceans outside of the shipping lanes.

Then there are the casual readings of uncalibrated thermometers by sailors who really only needed a general temperature ±5 degrees or so.

Temps used to be taken with wooden buckets. Then metal buckets this changes the observed temperature (wooden buckets reduce warming during collection and measurement)

Most temps come from ship seawater inlets. This is affected by ship rolls (deeper=coole) and whether before or after the circ pump (pump can add a degree or more)

Sea temps are even more bullshitty than land temps.

Might be accurate to ±10 degrees or so. Maybe.

And we can't even tell which direction they might be off.

John Henry

glenn said...

Funny how those “inadvertent errors” all go in the same direction.

MadisonMan said...

Weather prediction works because the atmosphere over short times is a 2D system.

No. If you have only observations in the horizontal, your predictions will fail spectacularly.

tim in vermont said...

I just want to own up to my own error. I predicted in a cafe a few days ago that the MSM would not run the correction. The WaPo did seem to phrase it dishonesty though, as has been noted above. With the correction, we are back to the missing heat.

You gotta like that they use joules to express the warming too. It makes for such large numbers. For instance if you ran a hot tub heater at the bottom of the ocean for an hour, you will have added 4 MEGA Joules to ocean heat content if you ran it for ten years it would be 350 giga joules and you would not be able to detect the change with a thermometer. So of course they don't report temperature changes.

tim in vermont said...

It takes 4 joules to heat a gram of water 1 degree, there are 28 grams in an ounce. I leave it to you to figure out how many ounces of water are in the world's oceans.

GatorNavy said...

Climate change is inevitable as the climate of this planet is dynamic due to things far beyond mankind's control. The problem with climate studies is that they are inherently flawed as the quantity and variability of phenomenon that affect this world climate are innumerable and constantly fluctuating on a geological (for local effects) and cosmological (for longer term effects) timelines.
One of the constants that is cited in the majority of climate studies is carbon dioxide. This I find very humorous as Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Pinatubo and Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland have individually blasted more carbon dioxide than mankind will ever be able to produce. Not to mention all the various sulfur compounds that also were blasted into our atomsphere.

John henry said...

Info on problems with historical sea temp records

ftp://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/allData/gosta_plus/retired/L2/binary/docs/document/papers/3_clmchg/3_clmchg.htm

John Henry

Yancey Ward said...

Nic Lewis was being kind to the authors of the study when he gave them the "inadvertent" out. The authors got caught is what happened. The authors have not retracted the paper, but claim to be "fixing it". The problem with climate "science" is that these "errors" always run in one direction, which means they probably aren't true mistakes, but are fudges to get the result one wants.

I think what happened here is pretty fucking simple- the authors designed the analysis to get the result they wanted, but didn't count on anyone taking too close a look at it, or being adept enough at statistics to ferret out what they did.

Howard said...

Blogger tim in vermont said...
You gotta like that they use joules to express the warming too. It makes for such large numbers. For instance if you ran a hot tub heater at the bottom of the ocean for an hour, you will have added 4 MEGA Joules to ocean heat content if you ran it for ten years it would be 350 giga joules and you would not be able to detect the change with a thermometer. So of course they don't report temperature changes.


Roger Pielke Sr., famous academic AGW contrarian and Father of Roger Pielke Jr. famous academic CAGW Impact contrarian (fired from 538) was a loud and vocal proponent of using Ocean Heat Content to measure Global Warming.

I agree with you about the units. For a given applied science/engineering subject, one should attempt to center the average on a whole number like 10. It's easier to get a sense of magnitude when the range is say 100 to 0.1. Not always possible, but it seems in my experience that academics love to use units that unnecessarily use scientific notation.

walter said...

Dave D said...That's a great journal Mike. I haven't seen one in years, but it is really funny!
-
Copies are almost non-existent..

Anthony said...

Bob Boyd said...
"Skepticism is the basis of scientific progress."

Funding is the basis of scientific work.


Corrected slightly, but spot on.

FullMoon said...

Impossible to form an opinion until Ritmo weighs in with insults and science

Luke Lea said...

The idea that global warming might be a modest and altogether manageable problem for the most adaptive species on earth is what the alarmists cannot abide. Their hostility to today's mass consumer capitalist society is at the bottom of it all. It's an attitude to which intellectuals are prone. Also explains why Marxism was so popular among them for so long. It is a mark of alienation.

John Pearley Huffman said...

Does anyone ever make "advertant errors?"

JPS said...

tim in vermont,

"You gotta like that they use joules to express the warming too. It makes for such large numbers."

Hey, at least "Exploding Hiroshima Bombs" seems to have fallen out of favor as a unit of excess heat added to the oceans.

Howard said...

Blogger Luke Lea said...Their hostility to today's mass consumer capitalist society is at the bottom of it all.

So, you think debt-fueled manufactured want of unfixable, planed obsolescent, cheap china crap consumer goods is healthy and desirable? I'm surprised conservatives don't harken back to the good old days when people saved before purchase, changed their own oil and went to the Grocery store to test and replace TV tubes.

MadTownGuy said...

John Pearley Huffman said...

"Does anyone ever make "advertant errors?" "

Sure they do. It's just that they don't always due care in analyzing the facts, and their faulty analysis could have been averted ...by using due care.

Bill Harshaw said...

The errors might be attributable to confirmation bias, but the prompt discovery of the errors and the corrections by the authors are the way science is supposed to work.



Achilles said...

Climate Change is not science. It is the politicized death of science.

The "theories" where we turn the earth into venus are pedaled by corrupt globalists and believed by idiots.

It is fun to watch them argue that if CO2 gets to 500 ppm we will go into an unstoppable cycle that kills all life on earth.

Particularly since the earth has been over 500 ppm CO2 for the majority of it's existence.

Achilles said...

As in everything else, the democrat position is a fraud.

They do not believe a single thing they say.

Richard Dolan said...

The mistakes in that paper were pointed out almost as soon as it was published, at Watt's UP and many other sites. So the authors are now just catching up with reality.

AA asks: "I wonder how much overstatement of certain[ty] happens because of a pull to see things 'in line with other studies that have drawn similar conclusions.' Can someone study that — in an unbiased, scientific way?" Yes, that would be nice, and in many disciplines it's not a problem. Just not in the politicized ones.

iowan2 said...

Howard said...
Blogger Luke Lea said...Their hostility to today's mass consumer capitalist society is at the bottom of it all.


So, you think debt-fueled manufactured want of unfixable, planed obsolescent, cheap china crap consumer goods is healthy and desirable? I'm surprised conservatives don't harken back to the good old days when people saved before purchase, changed their own oil and went to the Grocery store to test and replace TV tubes.

I copied the whole thing as an example of what the left thinks exemplifies debate.

Adding words to a persons statement to turn it around. Like 'White' gets added to Nationalist.

(I dont change my own oil, I have in the past replaced timing belts, and cam shafts. But with todays engines, and the proper disposal of waste important, I leave it to professionals, I dont fix my own buggy whips either)

JHapp said...

A lot of money is being bet today that it's going to be colder than predicted. Nat gas up 18%.

LakeLevel said...

It's funny how the "oceans warming" thing didn't exist just a few years ago. The climate scientists used a made up forcing function to increase the effect of CO2 in their climate models. The models predicted that certain areas of the earth's atmosphere would warm from the extra CO2. Good scientists tried to measure this warming with weather balloons and satellites. It wasn't there. Soooo.... The warming must have gone somewhere right? otherwise we have to chuck this whole thing. Quick someone prove that the warming is going into the oceans.

Howard said...

OK Iowa, I'll bite.

Luke set up a very broad-brush strawman of today's mass consumer capitalist society.

I then provided more detail as to the limited, specific and depraved aspects of wasteful consumer culture that environmentalists like myself are hostile to. I also imagine plenty of conservatives don't like the gluttony of mass consumerism either. Given every activity has an unfunded environmental cost, spending our high quality biosphere on black friday consumer herd culture seems short sighted and immoral.

Howard said...

Blogger Achilles said...

The "theories" where we turn the earth into venus are pedaled by corrupt globalists and believed by idiots.


EXACTLY!!! 100% And your little paraniod conspiracy theory conspiracy theory is pedaled by corrupt globalists (Heartland Coke Bros) and believed by idiots as well.

Seeing Red said...

No sunspots. It’s going to get colder.

Seeing Red said...

OK Howard, I’ll bite you environmentalist, you.

Are you for open borders?

Howard said...

SR makes a good point. Immigration from turd world shitholes to first world Disneyland increases the pollution footprint as these dusky imports gain spending power. However, world wealth is increasing as well, so it is just speeding up the inevitable.

MadisonMan said...

I leave it to you to figure out how many ounces of water are in the world's oceans.

My favorite question from a Qualifying exam: If you have a unique substance in a (1-gallon) bucket, and throw the bucket into the ocean, and wait 'til it's well-mixed, and come back at some point and extract a bucket of seawater: How likely is it that you retrieve a molecule of that unique substance?

Mike said...

The conclusions of the study are basically unchanged. What has changed are the uncertainties, which makes the conclusion a bit less certain.

tim in vermont said...

No Mikey, no.

tim in vermont said...

And define 'a bit' for us.

Achilles said...

Howard said...
OK Iowa, I'll bite.

Luke set up a very broad-brush strawman of today's mass consumer capitalist society.

I then provided more detail as to the limited, specific and depraved aspects of wasteful consumer culture that environmentalists like myself are hostile to. I also imagine plenty of conservatives don't like the gluttony of mass consumerism either. Given every activity has an unfunded environmental cost, spending our high quality biosphere on black friday consumer herd culture seems short sighted and immoral.



And the only way to fix this is a giant worldwide bureaucracy in a world without borders.

Controlled by leftists.

Of course.

Achilles said...

Mike said...
The conclusions of the study are basically unchanged. What has changed are the uncertainties, which makes the conclusion a bit less certain.

Fake but Accurate.

Leftists have no shame.

tim in vermont said...

Actually when the errors are corrected, we go right back to a number that is right around the numbers we got from other studies. So no news. It's not 'worse than we thought."

I wonder how many joules have gone into the ocean from cooling all of the nuclear powered war machines buzzing around therein? I bet that it looks like a huge number when expressed in joules.

tim in vermont said...

"In a recent article I set out why I thought that the trend in ΔAPOClimate was overstated, and its uncertainty greatly understated, in the Resplandy et al. ocean heat uptake study. In this article I expand on the brief explanation of the points made about “trend errors” and “scale systematic errors” given in my original article, as these are key issues involved in estimating the trend in ΔAPOClimate and its uncertainty" Nic Lewis at Judith Curry's blog.

Perhaps Mike can give us a better explanation of why Lewis is the one who is wrong than that Mike read it in a talking point memo.

Ken B said...

Madison Man
Cute question. My gut reaction is well nigh certain. A lot of molecules in a mole. Rough order of magnitude estimate. Assume 100 moles in bucket. Apporoximate the sea by pool 10^4 k radius by 10 k deep and 25 buckets to cubic metre. Still thousands to one there is a molecule there. So even if my estimates are off still highly probable.

Earnest Prole said...

Strange how bad climate math always errs in a leftward direction.

wildswan said...

You could develop a model that showed how as a scientific theory came closer and closer to influencing events in the political realm it became less and less open to fact-based correction but more and more open to election-based correction.

For instance, the California fires are held by some to be caused by global warming and by others to be caused by accumulated brush from fire suppression. The one theory holds sway in California; the other in areas of the country that support Trump. Acceptance of the theory as it now exists in California will not change not matter what the facts until California has a strong Republican party.

mandrewa said...

Mike said, "The conclusions of the study are basically unchanged. What has changed are the uncertainties, which makes the conclusion a bit less certain."


No, Mike. That is not true. The study has been basically invalidated. See Figure 1 of
https://judithcurry.com/2018/11/06/a-major-problem-with-the-resplandy-et-al-ocean-heat-uptake-paper/

DavidD said...

“the study... is in line with other studies that have drawn similar conclusions.”

Aren’t all studies that draw similar conclusions in line with other studies that drew similar conclusions?

What does this even mean?

It’s just fluffware.

Ken B said...

M Man
So google gives me 10^21 gallons in ocean. So I get around 10,000 avg molecules per bucket. Chances of no molecule vanishingly slim. Use poisson of some sort I guess.

alanc709 said...

Gov Brown vetoed a bi-partisan bill a couple years ago to establish a system of reducing the risk of wildfires caused by high voltage power lines, among others. He gave no reason for the veto. Appears the latest Northern California wildfire may have been caused by a broken high voltage power line. Guess his veto was caused by Global Warming.

tim in vermont said...

Busted. What I meant was that it falls in line with the general consensus of what the number was before he did his study which originally made the number look "worse than we thought![TM]"

The rest of the accepted studies, which his now joins, make it look 'not as bad as we thought."

tim in vermont said...

I hate writing on my phone.

mandrewa said...

“the study... is in line with other studies that have drawn similar conclusions.”

The odd thing about that assertion is that when this study was widely reported on in at least several dozen newspapers and magazines two weeks ago the headline was always that the oceans are taking up more heat than previously believed.

The contradiction should be obvious.

If we accept Nic Lewis's correction as accurate, which note the authors of the study have only partially so far done, then the significance of the corrected study will be that it amounts to a new independent method for measuring ocean heat gain, which although it has greater uncertainties than measuring ocean temperatures with thermometers (or equivalents), still roughly agrees with what these thermometers have been reporting.

OldManRick said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
OldManRick said...

The worst thing about the "hide the decline" is that the origin of the hockey stick is an attempt to deny the existence of the roman warm period, the medieval warm period, and little ice age. Before Mann's hockey stick, the global temperature models had a high correlation to the sunspot activity models. If the previous model was right, then the modern warm period is not unique and the current warm period cannot be blamed mostly on CO2. So Mann developed a temperature proxy based on Bristlecone tree rings that showed none of the historical warming and cooling events.

Any honest scientist would have abandoned this temperature proxy (and it's implications) when the proxy didn't match the temperatures of the period when we had other forms of measurement. Instead Mann and the CRU crew tried to hide the fact that the proxy didn't match known reality with the infamous "hide the decline".

Really, this should be so simple that anyone could understand it (even the lawyers here). Most engineers I know don't buy into CO2 driven global warming because this is obviously scientific malpractice. But without it, the whole global warming crisis falls apart so the true believers ignore it, edit Wikipedia aggressively to hide it, and call heresy on anyone who points it out. It is the Lysenkoism of the late 20th century. We are only missing our Stalin to enforce it.

Howard said...

Blogger Achilles said...

Howard said...
OK Iowa, I'll bite.

Luke set up a very broad-brush strawman of today's mass consumer capitalist society.

I then provided more detail as to the limited, specific and depraved aspects of wasteful consumer culture that environmentalists like myself are hostile to. I also imagine plenty of conservatives don't like the gluttony of mass consumerism either. Given every activity has an unfunded environmental cost, spending our high quality biosphere on black friday consumer herd culture seems short sighted and immoral.


And the only way to fix this is a giant worldwide bureaucracy in a world without borders.

Controlled by leftists.

Of course.


Your endless loop of straw-man points are your Achilles heel. Being a cunt is a choice, it's not to late to quit whinging like a teenage girl who just lost her charm bracelet

R. Duke said...

Tim in Vermont,

I saw your post about the underwater "drones" and I remember that study when it began. It sounded brilliant and would dispositively settle this discussion. After the first six months or year of operation the data showed cooling not warming. The headline on the story was "Oceans not warming as quickly as thought."
What is name of this study and where can you access this data?

thanks

Howard said...

RDuke: Argo floats in since 2004/2005. Not enough data to detect a trend yet.

http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/global_change_analysis.html#temp

Achilles said...

Howard said...

Your endless loop of straw-man points are your Achilles heel. Being a cunt is a choice, it's not to late to quit whinging like a teenage girl who just lost her charm bracelet

It must suck to be on team globalist shitbag.

Democrat Rashida Tlaib:

"Asked whether she supported a one-state or two-state solution, her response was clear: “One state. It has to be one state. Separate but equal does not work. I’m only 42-years old but my teachers were of that generation that marched with Martin Luther King. This whole idea of a two-state solution, it doesn’t work.”

On U.S. aid to Israel, she said, “Americans should not be aiding any country that doesn’t support human rights. I’ve been very clear. I will not support racist countries that pick and choose who gets access to justice.”"

Just another democrat that wants to wipe Israel off the map.

Democrats just put this woman in the US congress in a district where no republican even ran in the primary.

Lee Moore said...

I wonder how much overstatement of certain happens because of a pull to see things "in line with other studies that have drawn similar conclusions."

I don't believe this event falls into that category. The reason that this study was news in the first place was that it claimed greater certainty of doom than existing studies. They have now dialled back to no greate certainty of doom than existing studies. They weren't aiming for the middle of the pack, They were shotting for the stars, thought they'd got there, and have now fallen back into the middle of the pack, when their math was found to be faulty.

It's intersting btw that the sceptics seem, on average, to be mathier than the 98% consensus folk.

sdharms said...

if you hear a dog whistle you are the dog

tim in vermont said...

If they can't find a trend after fifteen years of precise whole ocean coverage, I am thinking that the trend is not worrisome.

Kirk Parker said...


robother said...

robother,

"Mistakes get made, in reaching for scientific conclusions beyond what data support. But peer review is there to catch them."

The heck it is! That may be the fable of peer review that the cognoscenti tell the rabble, but in actuality peer review is not any kind of confirmation or replication of a paper's thesis. Rather, it exists to answer a simpler, yet still urgent question: "Will we be embarrassed if we publish this paper?"