Joshua Emerson Smith, a reporter for the San Diego Union-Tribune, has picked it up, and the U-T gave his story prominent placement: “Climate contrarian uncovers scientific error, upends major ocean warming study.”

“It” was the revelation, by mathematician Nicolas Lewis, who specializes in statistical analysis related to climate change, that a major paper in Nature, widely considered the world’s premier scientific journal, grossly overestimated the amount of warming to the world’s oceans and, consequently, wrongly concluded that the lower end of “equilibrium climate sensitivity” (the amount that global average surface air temperature [GASAT] would rise, at equilibrium, in response to doubled atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration) should be raised from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s estimated 1.5 deg C to 2.0 deg C.

Lewis explained the problem in a post on “lukewarmer” Judith Curry’s blog. It’s not as if the error involved some deep, mysterious, complicated matter that required a math genius to detect (though I suspect Lewis is one). Certainly not. It was a simple matter of division: 23.2/25=0.928, not the 1.16 the study authors calculated—if we dare assume that’s what the authors did. It was so obvious that Lewis noticed it with just a quick bit of “mental arithmetic.” (What this should do to knee-jerk trust in peer review to ensure quality in science publications is obvious.)

Lewis went on to point out other errors and their implications—including the fact that even had the authors been right in their calculation of ocean heat uptake, it would not have followed (as they claimed) that even more stringent cuts in carbon dioxide emissions must be made to avoid >2.0 deg C of GASAT. In other words, even had the paper’s main finding been correct, its policy consequence wouldn’t have been justified.

Smith reports that the original study’s authors acknowledged their error and thanked Lewis for pointing it out and have submitted a correction to Nature.

Nonetheless, the paper got widespread media attention from the BBC, Washington Post, New York Times, Scientific American, CNN, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Independent, among others. Why? Because it supported climate alarmism.

Now will the same media give Lewis’s correction the same prominent coverage? Don’t hold your breath.

Update, November 15

Cornwall Alliance Senior Fellow Dr. Roy W. Spencer blogged about this:

For decades now those of us trying to publish papers which depart from the climate doom-and-gloom narrative have noticed a trend toward both biased and sloppy peer review of research submitted for publication in scientific journals.

Part of the problem is the increased specialization of climate science (and other sciences in general), so that there are relatively few peers who know enough about what they are reviewing to pass expert judgement on it. Instead, they simply give the paper author(s) the benefit of the doubt. I have been in this position many times when reviewing a paper for publication. This leads to group-think, as the number of experts in any sub-discipline dwindles.

If the conclusions of the paper support a more alarmist narrative on the seriousness of anthropogenic global warming, the less thorough will be the peer review. I am now totally convinced of that. If the paper is skeptical in tone, it endures levels of criticism that alarmist papers do not experience. I have had at least one paper rejected based upon a single reviewer who obviously didn’t read the paper…he criticized claims not even made in the paper.

A recent paper published in what is arguably the world’s most prestigious science journal, Nature, claimed that the oceans have been warming considerably faster than estimates made from actual thermometer measurements, which remain rather sparse even in the Argo float era.

Enter Nic Lewis, who along with Judith Curry has been publishing some of the most thorough estimates of climate sensitivity based upon the observational data and the usual assumed anthropogenic climate forcings (mostly increasing CO2). Despite not being a credentialed climate scientist, Mr. Lewis immediately identified a significant error in the paper, substantially altering the conclusions, which the authors now acknowledge.

The good news is that this is a case where the error was caught, and admitted to.

The bad news is that the peer review process, presumably involving credentialed climate scientists, should have caught the error before publication.

And as of noon November 15, there’d been no corrections in any of the major media that reported on the original study, according to this source.