Smoothing the Bumps A scientist could hardly be expected to be
happy about finding a mistake in his work after he published it.
But if you have to watch your research go down in flames, it may
help to regard it as an offering on the sacrificial fire of
scientific progress. In the case of “ocean cooling,” Willis has
plenty of reasons to consider the sacrifice worth it. The first
payoff for finding and fixing the XBT errors was that it allowed
scientists to reconcile a stubborn and puzzling mismatch between
climate model simulations of ocean warming for the past half
century and observations. The second was that it helped explain
why sea level rise between 1961-2003 was larger than scientists
had previously been able to account for. Much of what scientists
know about how ocean heat content has changed over the past half
century comes from the work of Sydney Levitus, the director of
NOAA’s Ocean Climate Laboratory in Silver Spring, Maryland, and
his colleagues. In the early 1990s, the United Nations Education
an