A scientific paper, published in Science magazine last week, led to widespread claims that the oceans were warming faster than previously thought, and received media attention around the world.

But less than a week after the headlines, an independent scientist, Nicholas Lewis, has found that team led by Lijing Cheng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, had made what he calls important factual errors. Lewis also says that some of Cheng’s statements are “misleading”

As Lewis explains:

The headlines all said that the oceans were warming even faster than previously thought. Unfortunately, the authors seem to have made several quite important errors and inappropriate comparisons. Ocean warming appears to be very much in line with earlier IPCC estimates, when correctly calculated, and slower over the last decade or so than predicted by climate models”

Lewis has become prominent in the climate debate because of his forensic reviews of important climate science results. Back in November, the authors of another much-publicised paper on the subject of ocean warming quickly admitted that Lewis had uncovered catastrophic errors in their results, although they have yet to formally withdraw their results. Lewis is now hoping that Cheng and his colleagues will also move swiftly to correct the record: