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A major new report about the dramatic warming of the oceans cites a 2018 Nature paper on the topic that was retracted earlier this week — the same day, in fact, that the report dropped.

But one of the authors of that paper tells Retraction Watch that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report, released September 25, must have meant to cite a different paper by the same authors.

The report concluded that:

It is virtually certain that the global ocean has warmed unabated since 1970 and has taken up more than 90% of the excess heat in the climate system (high confidence). Since 1993, the rate of ocean warming has more than doubled (likely).

In a section on global carbon burden, the document states that:

The analyses of the steadily growing number of surface ocean CO2 observations (now more than 20 million observations, SOCATv6 (https://www.socat.info/index.php/2018/06/19/v6-release/) demonstrate that the net ocean uptake of CO2 from the atmosphere has increased from around 1.2±0.5 Pg C yr-1 in the early 1980s to 2.0±0.5 Pg C yr-1 in the years 2010-2015 (Rödenbeck et al., 2014; Landschützer et al., 2016). Once new estimates of the outgassing flux stemming from river derived carbon of 0.8 Pg C yr-1 (Resplandy et al., 2018) are accounted for, these new observations imply that the rate of global ocean uptake of anthropogenic CO2 increased from 2.0±0.5 Pg C yr-1 to 2.8±0.5 Pg C yr-1 between the early 1980s and 2010-2015 (Rödenbeck et al., 2014; Landschützer et al., 2016; Le Quéré et al., 2018). This increase is supported by the current generation of ocean carbon cycle models (Le Quéré et al., 2018), and commensurate with the increase in atmospheric CO2.

The Resplandy citation is the now-retracted article in Nature. Ralph Keeling, the second author on that paper, tells Retraction Watch that

From the context, it’s clear they meant to cite a different paper, namely: Resplandy, L., R. F. Keeling, C. Roedenbeck, B. B. Stephens, S. Khatiwala, K. B. Rodgers, M. C. Long, L. Bopp and P. P. Tans (2018). “Revision of global carbon fluxes based on a reassessment of oceanic and riverine carbon transport.” Nature Geoscience 11(7): 504-508.

We contacted the IPCC press office to ask what had happened, and received an auto-reply:

I’m afraid that everyone is travelling away from the venue back to their home countries, but we will endeavour to respond as soon as we can. We will be able to start arranging interviews on Monday.

What makes the flawed citation more remarkable is that researchers have been aware of errors in the analysis for more than 10 months. As we — and others — have reported, almost immediately after publication of the paper Nic Lewis blogged about his concerns with the analysis, concerns that eventually prompted the retraction.

Keeling told us:

I very much appreciate your drawing this to my attention. Obviously, they need to fix the citation.

Update, 9/28/19, 1430 UTC: Alessandro Tagliabue, one of the authors of the IPCC report, acknowledged in a tweet to us that the citation was in error:

Sorry to disappoint, but it was a simple copy edit error. It should have been this paper: Resplandy et al (2018) Revision of global carbon fluxes based on a reassessment of oceanic and riverine carbon transport. Nature Geoscience 11(7): 504-508. Will be fixed in final version

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