Scientists acknowledged this week they made key errors in a study that claimed the Earth’s oceans are warming faster than previously thought.

The errors made their conclusions seem more certain than they actually are, UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography admitted two weeks after their bombshell study was published Oct. 31 in the prestigious journal Nature.

“Unfortunately we made mistakes here,” Ralph Keeling, a climate scientists at Scripps and the co-author of the study, told the Washington Post. “I think the main lesson is that you work as fast as you can to fix mistakes when you find them.”

The central conclusion of the study was that as more heat is being trapped within the Earth’s climate system each year, the oceans retain more of that energy and warm faster.

That hasn’t changed despite the errors — but Keeling said a miscalculation on the part of the authors means there’s a much larger margin of error in the findings.

The original study claimed that ocean temperatures had warmed 60 percent more than previously thought. But now, that increase in heat has a larger range of probability — between 10 percent and 70 percent.

“Our error margins are too big now to really weigh in on the precise amount of warming that’s going on in the ocean,” Keeling told the San Diego Tribune. “We really muffed the error margins.”

The paper got considerable media attention when it was published, as it suggested that there was less time than previously thought to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Not long after publication, a Britain-based researcher named Nicholas Lewis blasted the paper for having a “major problem” with the research.

“So far as I can see, their method vastly underestimate the uncertainty,” Lewis told the Washington Post. “As well as biasing up significantly, nearly 30 percent, the central estimate.”

Keeling thanked Lewis for alerting him to the mistake. A correction has been issued to Nature.