There was considerable consternation among climate scientists a few months back when a paper was published that appeared to show an abrupt cooling of the oceans, with them losing much of the heat that had built up over the past three decades in just two years. Now it appears that the abrupt cooling was actually an artifact of the instruments.

However, the correction to the paper raises further questions. First, the warming trend has stopped in the last two years however the data are presented. Secondly, it appears that the historical data have suffered from an artificial warming signal. How great this artificial warming was is unclear, so it is too early to say that it accounts for a significant amount of the warming attributed to the oceans over the past few decades.

Once again, this illustrates just how difficult climate science is, how it is an evolving field, and how little we really know with certainty about the Earth.