NASA releases detailed global climate change projections

Russ himself was so embarrassed by what he wrote that he took it down from his blog and resigned on account of it. Yet Eric Raymond was adamant that OSI spend their time and money defending Russ's position, which even Russ regretted publishing.

This quotes ESR's spirited defense of Russ's "Blacks are Lazy" blog posting: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/New-OSI-Presi...

My point is that ESR is not a trustworthy source of information. That he's racist is one reason not to trust him, but not the only. And there are many other examples of his ideological motivations interfering with his honesty.

The most relevant example was his deceptive behavior about reviewing code for the purpose of proving his pre-conceived notions about global warming and the motives of scientists.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

"During the Climategate fiasco, Raymond's ability to read other peoples' source code (or at least his honesty about it) was called into question when he was caught quote-mining analysis software written by the CRU researchers, presenting a commented-out section of source code used for analyzing counterfactuals as evidence of deliberate data manipulation. When confronted with the fact that scientists as a general rule are scrupulously honest, Raymond claimed it was a case of an "error cascade," a concept that makes sense in computer science and other places where all data goes through a single potential failure point, but in areas where outside data and multiple lines of evidence are used for verification, doesn't entirely make sense. (He was curiously silent when all the researchers involved were exonerated of scientific misconduct.)"

What is ironic is that ESR has spent so much time and energy talking and typing about the "many eyes" argument (since he was motivated to pump up the value of his VA Linux Systems stock -- http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/1999121000105NWLF ), and so little time actually reviewing any code himself.

And the little bit of code he did bother to review was not a security motivated review of OpenSSH, but a politically motivated review of global warming analysis software, which he totally misinterpreted, by presenting commented out code as deliberately deceptive evidence to support his arguments against global warming and attacks on the integrity of scientists.

"My favorite part of the "many eyes" argument is how few bugs were found by the two eyes of Eric (the originator of the statement). All the many eyes are apparently attached to a lot of hands that type lots of words about many eyes, and never actually audit code." -Theo De Raadt http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=129261032213320

ESR has published things about global warming that are outright wrong and purposefully deceptive, and he has refused to acknowledge or address many of the issues that people have raised with his mistakes, so his blog is not a good source of information in an argument about global warming.

Here are some sources better than rational wiki:

http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2009/12/software-quality-in-...

The slightly more nuanced, but equally specious, conclusion that bugs in this code mean that research results at the CRU must be wrong. Eric Raymond picks out an example he calls blatant data-cooking, but is quite clearly fishing for results, because he ignores the fact that the correction he picks on is never used in the code, except in parts that are commented out. He’s quote mining for effect, and given Raymond’s political views, it’s not surprising. Just for fun, someone quote mined Raymond’s own code, and was horrified at what he found. Clearly we have to avoid all open source code immediately because of this…? The problem, of course, is that none of these quote miners have gone to the trouble to establish what this particular code is, why it was written, and what it was used for.

Quote mining code: Today I’ll look at Eric Raymond’s alleged “siege cannon with the barrel still hot”: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/quote_mining_code.ph...

Someone quote mined Eric Raymond's own code: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/quote_mining_code.ph...

Comments on Eric Raymond's blog: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1447

BTW on 2009-11-26 at 12:25:52 said: "This, people, is blatant data-cooking, with no pretense otherwise." I don’t think so. If you look at the code in its entirety, you’ll see that the only line that uses yearlyadj is commented out and there are no references to anything in this code snippet code that isn’t commented out. So they calculate this “VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline”, but it never actually gets used. Had you shown the very next few lines of code that would have been clear: [...] That’s quite a trick to get commented out code to cook data...

Reasonable comments like this went unanswered:

Matt Cruikshank on 2009-11-30 at 17:00:05 said: Hey, esr, just out of curiosity – have you bothered to attempt to contact the authors? You’re a fairly prominent expert in software development; there seems to be a fairly good chance they’d answer your questions. Because what you’re doing seems to be fairly irresponsible: taking stolen source code, ignoring the fact that it’s commented out, accusing the author of having nefarious and deceitful intent, and stating with absolute certainty your conclusions about their human motivations. Please continue to ask pointed questions – science that can’t withstand scrutiny isn’t science. But leave the proselytizing until after the dust has settled.

The big issue is that so few people actually would need to download these large dataset.

Or, hell, any global warming denialist to publish predictions at all, or build any model at all beyond their day jobs of quote mining and writing clever PR releases that prey on the public's scientific illiteracy and fossil fuel barons' desire to violate other people's lives and properties with untrammeled carbon pollution.