Climate oopsie

This is what can happen when you rely on computer models:

• Scientists behind a headline-grabbing climate study admitted they “really muffed” their paper.
• Their study claimed to find 60 percent more warming in the oceans, but that was based on math errors.
• The errors were initially spotted by scientist Nic Lewis, who called them “serious (but surely inadvertent) errors.”

The scientists behind a headline-grabbing global warming study did something that seems all too rare these days — they admitted to making mistakes and thanked the researcher, a global warming skeptic, who pointed them out.

“When we were confronted with his insight it became immediately clear there was an issue there,” study co-author Ralph Keeling told The San Diego Union-Tribune on Tuesday.

Their study, published in October, used a new method of measuring ocean heat uptake and found the oceans had absorbed 60 more heat than previously thought. Many news outlets relayed the findings, but independent scientist Nic Lewis quickly found problems with the study.

Keeling, a scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, owned up to the mistake and thanked Lewis for finding it. Keeling and his co-authors submitted a correction to the journal Nature.

Nic Lewis, the independent scientist who spotted the oopsie, had his calculations confirmed by others:

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

Lewis pointed out the errors in Keeling’s study in a blog post published Nov. 6 on climate scientist Judith Curry’s website. Lewis wrote that “[j]ust a few hours of analysis and calculations … was sufficient to uncover apparently serious (but surely inadvertent) errors in the underlying calculations.”

Lewis is an ardent critic of climate scientists’ over-reliance on climate models, which he says predict too much warming. Lewis and Curry published a study earlier in 2018 that found climate models overestimated global warming by as much as 45 percent.

Lewis’s corrections were quickly confirmed by University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke Jr. Pielke called Keeling’s acceptance and willingness to correct the mistakes a “lesson in graciousness.” 

So, how about we hold off on subsidizing those solar panels, wind turbines and other play-like "energy generators"?