So in actuality, they never failed to correctly determine the scurvy-preventing capability of a given fruit when they tested it, they just spent a lot of time working under the un-tested and incorrect assumption that lemons and limes would work similarly, based on an un-tested hypothesis for the mechanism of scurvy prevention.
Well actually it's more that they fail to take account of a missing parameter. And there is quite a lot of missing parameters in actual climatology. It's not like we are in Back to the Future's 2015 where they can accurately forecast weather.
