Note added Nov 6th 2019: I regret this post and have given Nic Lewis an apology.
--
I'll assume you know by now the saga of the
10/31 Resplandy et al Nature paper that found a larger uptake of heat by the ocean.
Short story: Nic Lewis found an issue with the paper, but then couldn't refrain from acting unprofessionally.
Longer story via a timeline recap:
10/31 - Respandy et al publish a
paper in
Nature that uses a new method to calculate heat uptake by the ocean, finding that "the ocean gained 1.33 ± 0.20 × 10
22 joules of heat per year between 1991 and 2016, equivalent to a planetary energy imbalance of 0.83 ± 0.11 watts per square metre of Earth’s surface."
10/31 - Media coverage,
such as WaPo's "Over the past quarter-century, Earth’s oceans have retained 60 percent more heat each year than scientists previously had thought."
11/6 - Nic Lewis writes a
blog post on Judith Curry's site with the title "A major problem with the Resplandy et al. ocean heat uptake paper" -- a big feather in his cap -- also saying he contacted Resplandy.
11/7 - Nic Lewis writes a second
blog post, "Resplandy et al. Part 2: Regression in the presence of trend and scale systematic errors"
11/8 - An
article in
Reason magazine quotes Nic Lewis as saying,
Via email, Lewis responded: "I've had no substantive response from Professor Resplandy, just a non-committal reply saying that they were looking into the questions I had raised and if they found anything that needed correction they would address it. Unfortunately, they have every incentive to conclude that they don't need to take any action! So do Nature; journals don't like being made to look foolish."
(Emphasis mine.) This insult takes the feather out of Lewis's cap.
11/13 - media coverage of Resplandy et al's correction, for example,
WaPo.
11/14 -
a post on Realclimate.org about their error and correction, by Ralph Keeling, a co-author on the paper, also writing "We would like to thank Nicholas Lewis for first bringing an apparent anomaly in the trend calculation to our attention."
So only two days after he pointed out what he thought was an error, Nic Lewis was already castigating Resplandy et al for not acknowledging his analysis. [
Correction 11/21: Lewis says he email Resplandy on 11/1. So it was 5 days before his blog post. This doesn't change my opinion that his 11/8 comments to Reason
were unprofessional.] He gave them
no-to-little time for analysis, no time to figure out what he was saying or to address the subtleties involved -- Lewis was mostly interested in scoring points.
That's unprofessional.
This paper went from publication to correction in
two weeks. (BTW, their results didn't change much; see below.) But that wasn't good enough -- Nic Lewis wanted to do a victory lap on their faces just TWO DAYS after his blog post, when he had no idea if Resplendy et al were considering his argument or not. In fact, they
were considering it, carefully.
Nic Lewis owes Respendy et al an apology.
PS: The Resplandy et al results didn't get much lower after this correction, but do now have a much larger error bar: they went from an oceanic heat uptake of (1.33 ± 0.20) x 10
22 J/yr from 1961-2016 to (1.21 ± 0.72) x 10
22 J/yr, a decrease of 9%.
PPS: Come on, how about using zettajoules (1 ZJ = 10
21 J)? Odd units are why spacecraft crash.
