Oops!

The National Review is reporting today that some climate scientists have discovered a significant error in their recent calculations of rising ocean temperatures.

The article reports:

Two researchers have been forced to issue a major correction to a recent study indicating oceans have been warming at a significantly higher rate than previously thought due to climate change.

The paper, published October 31 in the scientific journal Nature, suggested ocean temperatures have risen roughly 60 percent higher than estimated by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But, after errors in the authors’ methodology were identified, they realized their findings were roughly in line with those of the IPCC, after all.

The researchers’ alarming findings were uncritically reported by numerous mainstream-media outlets but Nic Lewis, a mathematician and popular critic of the consensus on man-made climate change, quickly identified errors.

The scientists who did the original research quickly realized their mistake:

Ralph Keeling, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who co-authored the paper, said he and his partner, Laure Resplandy of Princeton, quickly realized the implications of their mistake once Lewis pointed it out.

“When we were confronted with his insight it became immediately clear there was an issue there,” he said. “We’re grateful to have it be pointed out quickly so that we could correct it quickly.”

After correcting their mistake, Keeling said their research indicates oceans are warming only slightly faster than previously thought, not dramatically faster as they initially reported. Keeling said the miscalculation was made when they were calculating their margin of error, which had a larger range (10 to 70 percent) than they initially believed.

When the initial report came out, the alarmists were quick to alarm:

The IPCC released a report last month calling on governments to take drastic action to combat climate change. According to the report, global carbon emissions must be cut by 20 percent by 2030 and completely eliminated by 2075 in order to prevent temperatures from rising two degrees above pre-industrial levels, at which point coastal areas would be completely flooded and hundreds of millions of people would be in danger of starvation.

I am not yet convinced that man is responsible for any global warming that may be occurring–cyclical climate change has been a part of the earth’s existence since the earth existed. I do believe that we have a responsibility to limit pollution as much as possible, but I don’t believe we are significant enough to interfere with the earth’s cyclical climate changes.

Sometimes The Earth Just Doesn’t Cooperate With The Scientists

The Daily Caller posted an article today about some recent occurrences involving Arctic ice.

The article reports:

For years, scientists have been warning the Arctic was in a “death spiral” and could soon be ice-free during the summertime and shrink to unprecedented levels due to man-made global warming. Such ice loss could be “irreversible,” some scientists claimed.

But new research from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography says that predictions of an ice-free Arctic are based on “oversimplified” theories. Scripps researchers, who were co-funded by the Navy, found that the Arctic sea ice may be “substantially more stable than has been suggested in previous idealized modeling studies.”

I should probably point out at this point that I am not in favor of dirty water, dirty air, or any other sort of pollution. I just have serious doubts as to whether the earth is warming or whether man actually has anything to do with any climate change that is occurring.

There were many predictions saying that Arctic Ice would be gone by 2030–the levels of ice had decreased in 2007, 2008, and 2009, and some scientists were saying that the ice would not come back. However, that is not what has happened.

The article concludes:

NSIDC (National Snow and Ice Data Center) and European satellite data show that multi-year sea ice made a big comeback in 2013 and 2014 — increasing from 2.25 to 3.17 million square kilometers during that time and making up 43 percent of the north pole’s ice pack.

In fact, Arctic sea ice extent as a whole seems to be stabilizing despite this year’s record low maximum in February. NSIDC data shows Arctic sea ice extent is currently within the normal range based on the 1981 to 2010 average extent.

“Global sea ice is at a record high, another key indicator that something is working in the opposite direction of what was predicted,” Dr. Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Forum, told the U.K. Express in January.

“Most people think the poles are melting… they’re not,” he said. “This is a huge inconvenience that reality is now catching up with climate alarmists, who were predicting that the poles would be melting fairly soon.”

Global warming is not a proven fact. Until it is, it would be foolish for industrialized nations to cripple their economies to accommodate faulty science. Again, we need to cut down on pollution simply because it is a bad thing, but we do not have to go overboard to create a result that is questionable at best.