I agree that the code needs a thorough going over, and the mistakes, kludges, etc., documented for all to see. On the other hand, given what gets reported (and not reported) by the weather stations, the fact that they move around, and, more fundamentally, the fact that none of them were designed to be part of a world-wide thermometer accurate to a tenth of a degree C., it’s not clear what can be salvaged. The whole gridding thing is a nightmare, and it results from the fact that there was no experimental design; the numbers just come in. Too much room for judgment calls; too much to argue about.

It is not just the researches that were dishonest. The granters of the government resources are the greater problem. If government were not passing out money to fund the fraud that would increase their power, there would have been no motive for the fraud.

Dishonest scientists on their own could not have carried the fraud for a decade. It took the state for that.

The answer is pretty simple, Nik. This was never about science. This was always about money, power and ideology. The political left has seized upon AGW as the way to force a multi-trillion dollar redistribution of the world’s economic resources under the direction of governments around the world. This is a leftist’s wet dream.

Also, you have to consider who has vested interests in AGW. If there is no AGW, then untold millions of reserach dollars dry up. If there is no AGW, then entrenched, well-funded bureaucracies like the IPCC have no reason to exist. Ergo, there must be global warming, even if the data have to be fudged to get it.

Given this sort of sloppiness (which would get an F in any programming class) it’s hardly a surprise that the program is a complete nonsensical irreproducible mess.

Furthermore, how can science test itself without full disclosure?

We are not talking about Apple creating a new product, or National defense issues, this is data that should be available to the entire scientific community for validation.

“Release all the data and all the models. Let everyone, even big oil and king coal, take a crack at it. What is there to hide? If the skeptics play games like the proponents do it will only weaken their case.

Trying to argue it out here is a waste of time.

A co-worker once got a theory in his head on what moved stock prices. He build model, collected data, and refined and refined until the backtesting was perfect. He sent the output to me. I said fine, send me the models and data sets so I can check it out. He said he would not because they were proprietary. He still wanted my help selling is “product.” That really is the situation the CRU people are in. They simply have to toss open ALL the data, models and code. If it is correct it will stand if not it will not.

BTW, his model apparently did not account properly for LIBOR spread gaps circa 2008. LOL.
Google LTCM if you want another example of too much faith in proprietary models.”

Stop hiding behind the “illegally” obtained defense. This was the action of a whistleblower, someone inside who had direct knowledge of this fraud. I have a feeling as with all good scandals, the first discovery of impropriety is only the tip of the iceberg!

Hey, Al, what now…..what’s the next global crisis you can bank on?

However, the lay person only needs to know this about the file which they can verify for themselves — specifically he HARRY_READ_ME.txt file) is a THREE YEAR journal of a CRU programmer describing everything he tried with the data and models in an attempt to reproduce existing results CRU had published. Comments in the file make it clear that “HARRY” tried FOR THREE YEARS to recreate CRU’s published results AND FAILED.

Do you see the REAL significance of this because it is absolutely fatal to the credibility of anything CRU has produced.

What we have here is a documented THREE year effort by a CRU programmer, who had access to all the data, access to all the code, access to all the people who developed the code and the models and still HE could still NOT duplicate CRU’s OWN results. If he can’t it simply means the CRU’s results cannot be reproduced even by themselves and so there is no point anyone else even trying — CRU themselves have proven it’s a waste of time and so they themselves have proven their own results are plain rubbish. That means any “peer reviewed” document CRU produced along with any other papers that cited the CRU papers are based on data the CRU themselves can’t verify.

Besides, the absolutly sorry state of affairs in the data handling and software managment the HARRY_READ_ME.txt reveals, the utter and total mess of CRU data and software this document reveals is WHY CRU has not released its data and model software.

Given the CRU is one of the most, if not the most cited sources of climate data — upon which trillions of dollars of economic policy is being set, the importance of what the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file reveals becomes scary.

A very nice layman’s summary of some of the issues in the HARRY_READ_ME.txt can eb found here

http://www.devilskitchen.me.uk/2009/11/data-horribilis-harryreadmetxt-file.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheDevilsKitchen+%28The+Devil%27s+Kitchen%29&utm_content=Netvibes