So rather than GISTEMP being used to control the future of the world as you initially claimed, you now just think that the code used to produce it has too many GOTO statements in it, and variable names that aren’t what you’d choose to call them? And you think this somehow means that all of climate science is on shaky ground? Does it mean that the 40% rise of CO2 concentrations does not affect the radiative balance of the atmosphere? That glaciers aren’t actually receding? That arctic ice is not shrinking rapidly? That sea levels are not rising?

What you can’t seem to get your head around is the wealth of observational evidence showing that global warming is happening. Even if it were impossible to measure the surface temperature accurately, we’d still know that the temperature was rising. But it is very possible, and we can see that GISTEMP is accurate because it is independently corroborated. Or do you also think that HadCRUT3 is wrong? And RSS? And UAH?

Thank you for that. You explain your point of view a lot more clearly now.

I have not intended any claim that “a GW code will rule the world”. That’s a misunderstanding. What I intended by my phrase was a far more ordinary thing.

What I was arguing about was whether the science and data used to support the case for AGW was of sufficient quality that it is safe to use it in guidance for setting economic and social policy. Government leaders stand before us calling for action, set taxes and targets, sign international treaties, create markets for carbon credits, and apply pressure in a myriad of ways to try to get everyone to reduce CO2 emissions. The media and a variety of campaign groups seek to influence public opinion to bring about social changes. And all of these changes have economic effects that have been calculated to be on the order of trillions of dollars, affecting the welfare of billions of people. And they do so on the basis of “science” presented by political organisations like the IPCC.

When you write code to fly a jet aeroplane, or the space shuttle, or a nuclear reactor, the safety implications of getting it right require extreme care and the highest quality. The code is documented and checked and re-checked. It is written following strict procedures and methodologies by people qualified in software engineering so as to minimise the possibility of error. And that’s for cases involving only a few hundred lives. Shouldn’t we be taking just as much care when it’s going to affect billions?

When the politicians and general public listen to the scientists, they get the impression that the science is so well-established and so carefully checked that it cannot be argued with. And yet much of it is based on methods and data that are of very poor quality. Exactly how much of it was done isn’t very well documented, but a few little bits of it have become visible, and they give cause for worry.

One particularly prominent temperature anomaly reconstruction, appearing in the IPCC reports and many of the media presentations, is GISTEMP, which is published by a division of NASA called GISS. Because it’s NASA, and because it is produced and endorsed by some of the most prominent of the IPCC experts in climatology, it has a great deal of credibility. It is by no means the only such data, but it is an important piece of the evidence, and it may be considered fairly typical. It is widely regarded as an authority one can cite without having to add caveats by some of the most respected figures in climatology. And yet up until recently the way it was actually calculated was unpublished. There had been a number of requests made of NASA regarding the algorithm, but only some rather vague high level summaries of the method were ever made available, insufficient to replicate the calculations.

Anyway, it’s a long story, but after various interested parties started to try to work out how the algorithm worked from looking at the data inputs and outputs, and found some glaring errors that had somehow lain undetected by the whole climate community for about 6 years, NASA was eventually forced to publish the actual code. Far from being the high quality software engineering you would expect of a flagship data product from NASA, a product used in the IPCC reports to make a case for drastic social change, it turned out to be of lower quality than one would expect from undergraduate student homework. There is no formal documentation and the comments are few and terse. The variable names are short and cryptic. The program flow is a spaghetti of GOTO statements. It is written using obsolete versions of the language compilers. There are numerous ad hoc fixes and adjustments to get round the many gaps and anomalies in the raw data. There are complicated rounding issues to do with the way numbers are represented. When overlapping temperature series are spliced together, offsets are added to one or other to get them to line up that have unknown effects on the trends. And so on. It’s a mess.

Now I am far from being obsessive about software having to be well written, and for academic study in a subject area that doesn’t much matter, I probably wouldn’t bother. SMPs and SCRs and regression tests are boring. I’d probably hesitate to publish on the basis of it myself, but I wouldn’t get anal about it if it sometimes happened. But this is the end of the world as we know it they’re predicting here, or so Al Gore and Ted Turner would have us believe. This is the most important crisis of our generation, possibly the most important threat to civilisation since the black death. You would have thought, wouldn’t you, that it was important enough that they could employ a dozen or so software engineers and statisticians to make sure the code was done right, so that we could know that the data is correct?!

Now you may be right, and maybe the leaders of the world won’t really march us all off the cliff, or we won’t really follow them or whatever. But it won’t be for want of trying on the part of the AGW campaigners at the IPCC. In any case, I hope you would agree that for your statements “People disagree. People debate.” to be true, sceptics are needed and they need to be allowed to voice their views freely in public debate. If those views are of poor quality and unconvincing, so be it. And if the pro-AGW scientists’ arguments are also of poor quality, then people really ought to be told about that, too.

I can talk about some the other issues you mention too, if you like, but I’d like to deal with things one at a time. Otherwise the argument diverges all over the place and nothing gets dealt with properly.

Do you understand what I mean now about the “code” thing?

Many other posters have been responding very aggressively (and wrongly). I’ve even seen here references of subsidies for renewables. I don’t understand much this hatred against subsidies to the beggining of a new market. That is how the internet began. Worse, that is how the oil market began. That is how the gas market began. Coal. Nuclear. Etc. Why would wind and solar not have the same treatment? Just because they are infants (and the hell with infants?)

And if you want to compare subsidies, that’s fine by me. A question: how many dollars is the oil REALLY costing to the US, if you have to go to war to secure the market? Trillions? Does it double the cost of the barrel? Triple? I’ve seen calculations that went to 400$/barrel as the true cost of the barrel. How’s that for a subsidy? People are so focused at trying to see mice in the floor that they forget to look at the elephant in the room.

I agree with you that Fossil Fuels, specially coal, is very important to undeveloped nations. Sadly, its cost is soaring.

“it will take more than a bare assertion if you want to convince anyone that I argue without logic. The burden of proof here is upon the AGW faithful”

I simply do not understand your stance on the “code” thing. It seems ridiculous indeed. Could you clarify?

Last, but not least, the matter of fact is that the poster of the blog has an agenda of nitpicking every goddam error in the scientific panorama about GW in order to create confusion and refute its reputation. Where’s the acknowledged valid points on that? It’s inherently destructive.

I do understand the why of it, and that’s why I respect it. There’s a feeling that GW advocates are winning the “war” on the people’s minds and certain free-thinkers get angry at the sheepish mood that is embebbed in the “Consensus” tag, and try to snipe it out. I love that, the destructive force of skepticism.

But one must also keep in mind that this is a skeptic point of view, which means that there is a mainstream view which is more or less coherent, aka GW. The skeptics don’t have to be coherent, they simply snipe everything. Sometimes it’s the GW itself, some other times, they acknowledge GW but say that it isn’t by much, sometimes they acknowledge even that, but argue that it doesn’t matter much. It’s called goalpost changes. And it behaves exactly like Creationism does.

You don’t need me to find the evidence. You can easily check for yourself to see if wealth is correlated with energy use per capita, whether the cost/Watt of renewable sources is higher or lower than for fossil, or whether the drop in UK emissions was more to do with the “dash to gas” in the early 90s than it was our building wind farms and making speeches about going green post-Kyoto.

I don’t actually care whether you believe me, and I’m pretty sure there’s nothing that anyone could say that would change your mind. I was simply telling you that your argument had failed to convince, and why. If you want to adjust your argument in response, you’re welcome. If you want to correct any point of mine you think is wrong or to explain where you think it is misleading, please do. If you think you’ve proved your point, don’t have anything else you think you can usefully add and want to drop it, that’s also OK. Or if you think you have a devastating logical argument that rises above name calling, then go ahead.

Dismissing something as “paranoid ramblings” isn’t an argument, and repeatedly describing an opponent in debate as not sane, wrong in the head, a bit mental, and so on just makes your case look like it came straight from the playground. Distinctly unimpressive.

Seriously, I’ve debated a few AGW believers that I had a good deal of respect for. They always strove to raise the level of debate without losing their patience or temper, they acknowledged valid points and areas of uncertainty, and they provided some good solid arguments that I had to acknowledge from time to time. I learnt a lot from them. It’s not impossible.

Luis, it will take more than a bare assertion if you want to convince anyone that I argue without logic. The burden of proof here is upon the AGW faithful, and empty assertions carry no weight. ‘Facts’ need to be relevant and correct. And the principle source of ad hominems and foul language around here is the character you seem to be praising. That doesn’t speak well for your judgement.
Try posting an argument with some intellectual content.

“Scientist”, when the IPCC provides its guidance to policymakers, do the policymakers pay any attention? If they do, (and I think many of them have,) that looks like a steer to me. When the media and the campaigners seek to influence public opinion and behaviour by presenting NASA’s temperature graphs, are they not seeking to steer society? Do you think they have had no influence over people? When you yourself have posted the same numbers here, have you not been seeking to steer public opinion, that of “passers by”? Or are we not supposed to pay any attention to you all when you point us to these charts and data?

I find it most amusing that you seem to have such difficulty with basic English comprehension, while at the same time imagining that calling someone “wrong in the head” and “struggling to understand” is the act of a intelligent and mature debater, or someone whose opinion is worth listening to. As I explained to you before, every time you start it, you get dismissed as a not very bright troll, which of course suits me. I find it even funnier that I can even tell you what I’m doing, and you still fall into it every time. I expect you’re going to escalate to incoherent swearing again next. You usually do when you’re losing.

The world is steered by code in much the same way a ship might be steered by the stars. How an aircraft may be flown by the seat of ones pants. A piano played by ear. Fine adjustments made by eye. A theorem proved by contradiction. A journey travelled by road or rail.

I’ll admit, I can’t make up my mind now whether you’re serious; whether you really interpreted relatively straightforward English in such a bizarre way unintentionally, or whether it was all supposed to be an obscure-but-clever pun that I just didn’t get. Amusing, anyway.

I was, as you will recall, talking about whether the science being presented was “the sort of quality data on which you ought to feel comfortable making multi-trillion dollar decisions.” In context, it seems reasonably obvious to me that it wasn’t the science/data making the decision, but people making judgements based on the data. And that as I said, these decisions were being made on the basis of data of insufficient quality.

So you’re saying you never had a problem with the idea that the IPCC and AGWists might be relying on duff code when advising the United Nations of the World, you just thought I had meant to say the code itself was doing the advising, and you thought that was crazy? And it never occurred to you that in that case I probably meant something else? Do I believe that?