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Comment by sometimeshuman | Hacker News Reader

Related, days ago the BBC reported what I assumed was a typo that the ocean temperature has risen 13.8C the past ~30 years. After reading the article I tried to double check the source but couldn't easily find it.

Yesterday HN's top 30 had a similar story from some blog I had never heard of. Their source was the BBC and a paper that didn't show 13.8C. Now we have a typo(?) spreading like a virus.

The chart in this Wired article shows a ~1.38C difference which is alarmingly high. What troubles me is how many people, even HN'ers, just ran with a 13.8C number without question. Am I missing something ? Is there any scientific paper showing 13.8C, which would likely kill a significant portion of marine life ? I'll do a time-boxed (2 years) boycott of the BBC until proven otherwise.

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I find it a bit weird that you’re publicly criticizing people for sharing poorly sourced claims…while not sharing any links to the supposed articles that were so bad.

Anyway, here’s a BBC article about oceans warming. “13.8C” appears in it. But it doesn’t claim oceans globally heated up by 13.8C. It says a specific area of the ocean was 13.8 C hotter than average in March, while making it clear that the oceans globally were nowhere near that much hotter than average. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65339934

P.S. I do think it's reasonable to be a little nervous about that 13.8C number--it's really enormous, and it is off the scale for that map that the Wired article shared. But that's not the same as what you said.

You are right, I saw what appeared to be a 10X lower value in Wired and posted my misunderstanding prematurely. Here's the the blog post that appeared on HN's top 30 from yesterday. But I still can't find a reference to a paper with the 13.8C number in either the BBC article or the blog post. It may be in my blindspot.*

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35747417

*Sorry HN (and BBC), I had surgery recently and am taking narcotics. I won't post for a while since I'm not sure my thinking is clear and I may be criticizing unfairly.

I dont think you did anything wrong. So while it wasn't on average 13.8C, even a specific area of 13.8C was still an order of magnitude wrong and clearly a typo.

And something that is so wrong, being repeated on HN, should be called out. So your Data and Facts may not be exact, your motive, intuition wasn't wrong though. You should always question what you are reading.

And even on technical subject this happens a lot. I had to spend 3 months on HN correcting what the public media called Apple's "Unified Memory" as if it was memory on Die. It is not, it was simple LPDDR Memory on same package. Or AirPod sold at BOM cost, Apple invented USB-C, AV1 being completely patent free. True 5G is all about mmWave etc.

Although my opinion of banning BBC for 2 years is a little too hash for a typo. It happens, and in fact in the modern era it happens more often than you can imagine. BBC is still far better news source than 99.9999999% of the Internet.

Jeez, embarrassing for GP

Obviously a typo

> I'll do a time-boxed (2 years) boycott of the BBC until proven otherwise.

Oh wow

I find this temperature chart puts things into a proper perspective https://xkcd.com/1732/

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