Climategate
blogs.telegraph.co.uk
Climategate
1–10 of 28 posts
Re: Climategate
#2The real scandal is more subtle, and much more serious.
There is evidence from some of the leaked e-mails and source code that the main climate model is, in the words of an unnamed developer called Ian, useless:
I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation - apparently linear as well. As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless. It also means that we cannot say exactly how the gridded data is arrived at from a statistical perspective - since we're using an off-the-shelf product that isn't documented sufficiently to say that. Why this wasn't coded up in Fortran I don't know - time pressures perhaps? Was too much effort expended on homogenisation, that there wasn't enough time to write a gridding procedure? Of course, it's too late for me to fix it too. Meh.[1]
This is the climate model that is relied upon for public policy decisions in governments across the world. This is the model that will be used as the main arguing point for global warming in next months meeting of world leaders in Copenhagen to address the issue. This is basically the model that is responsible for political decisions that will relocate billions of dollars across the world.
And at least one of the programmers thinks it's rubbish and doesn't work.
[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/11/24/taking_liberties/ent...
Re: Climategate
#3Inane and (of course) overblown. "The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed", he says. He offers the same out-of-context snippets as everyone else. Blah blah "eco-fascist" blah blah "Libtards" blah blah. A volley of links making such sensible claims as that the Copenhagen meeting is "a step closer to one-world government".
Nothing new to see here.
Re: Climategate
#4The real scandal is more subtle, and much more serious. There is evidence from some of the leaked e-mails and source code that the main climate model is, in the words of an unnamed developer called Ian, useless: I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation - apparently linear as well. As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless. It al…
It's interesting that this information isn't offered on articles describing emissions caps that are being agreed to in advance of these upcoming talks on climate change. I'd imagine that from now on other climate research departments will keep a tighter lid on their internal communications at any rate.
I never really thought I'd miss Bush but at least he was smart enough to not take the global warming stuff seriously to begin with. Even during the worst depression since the 30s Obama still wants more regulations. This is just amazing.
Re: Climategate
#5The real scandal is more subtle, and much more serious. There is evidence from some of the leaked e-mails and source code that the main climate model is, in the words of an unnamed developer called Ian, useless: I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation - apparently linear as well. As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless. It al…
Er, no, he doesn't say that the main climate model is useless, or that "it's rubbish and doesn't work". He doesn't say anything even slightly like that. The particular thing he's saying is "meaningless" is a figure that has basically nothing to do with actual climate simulation.
Clearly he's not impressed with the quality of the code. Fair enough. There's a lot of very poor code around doing important things. It looks to me as if after all Ian's cleanups, he ends up with code that produces essentially the same as the pre-cleaned-up code, which suggests that the code-quality issues he found don't invalidate the actual calculations.
Another thing that's notable: here we have a lengthy, ill-tempered diary of someone's attempt to wrestle with this big hairy codebase and the big hairy pile of ill-formed data (supplied from the outside world; this isn't all CRU's fault) that it processes, and in all his notes of what he's doing and his interactions with colleagues we don't see anything like "Ran the code again. It's weird -- it doesn't predict any substantial warming at all" or "Joe told me to change X and Y to make the figures look scarier" or "Wait, this bit here is obviously fudged". This despite a clear willingness to moan about his colleagues' work.
In other words, this seems like it would be exactly the sort of place where you'd see evidence of conspiracy and dishonesty if there were any, and there is no such evidence there.
Re: Climategate
#6The real scandal is more subtle, and much more serious. There is evidence from some of the leaked e-mails and source code that the main climate model is, in the words of an unnamed developer called Ian, useless: I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation - apparently linear as well. As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless. It al…
It's interesting that this information isn't offered on articles describing emissions caps that are being agreed to in advance of these upcoming talks on climate change. I'd imagine that from now on other climate research departments will keep a tighter lid on their internal communications at any rate. I never really thought I'd miss Bush but at least he was smart enough to not take the global warming stuff seriously…
We're not in a depression, we're in a recession.. and it was the lack of regulation that caused it not abundance.
Re: Climategate
#7The real scandal is more subtle, and much more serious. There is evidence from some of the leaked e-mails and source code that the main climate model is, in the words of an unnamed developer called Ian, useless: I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation - apparently linear as well. As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless. It al…
Er, no, he doesn't say that the main climate model is useless, or that "it's rubbish and doesn't work". He doesn't say anything even slightly like that. The particular thing he's saying is "meaningless" is a figure that has basically nothing to do with actual climate simulation. Clearly he's not impressed with the quality of the code. Fair enough. There's a lot of very poor code around doing important things. It look…
No, you are wrong. Read thee whole quote here http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/11/24/taking_liberties/ent... and observe that the programmer is convinced the whole database of reporting stations is bogus, and the model has been tweaked multiple times: "Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the update prog."
also "One thing that's unsettling is that many of the assigned WMo codes for Canadian stations do not return any hits with a web search. Usually the country's met office, or at least the Weather Underground, show up – but for these stations, nothing at all. Makes me wonder if these are long-discontinued, or were even invented somewhere other than Canada!"
So much for 'scientific model supported by hard data'.
Re: Climategate
#8Inane and (of course) overblown. "The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed", he says. He offers the same out-of-context snippets as everyone else. Blah blah "eco-fascist" blah blah "Libtards" blah blah. A volley of links making such sensible claims as that the Copenhagen meeting is "a step closer to one-world govern…
It's not for nothing that the Daily Telegraph is nicknamed the Torygraph, here in the UK: it's notable for a rather specific right-wing political spin, and climate denialism is part of the package.
There are certainly things to be worried about in those emails, but proof of a conspiracy they ain't.
Re: Climategate
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting that this information isn't offered on articles describing emissions caps that are being agreed to in advance of these upcoming talks on climate change. I'd imagine that from now on other climate research departments will keep a tighter lid on their internal communications at any rate. I never really thought I'd miss Bush but at least he was smart enough to not take the global warming stuff seriously…
We're not in a depression, we're in a recession.. and it was the lack of regulation that caused it not abundance.
it was the lack of regulation that caused it
So it was politically motivated regulation that caused this recession/depression.
Re: Climategate
#10This is a dumb and sensationalist article that adds nothing to what we already know. The most interesting news to come out of climate gate in the past few days are a behind-the-scenes timeline of scientists illegally suppressing responses to FOI requests, the fact that many IPCC analyses might be irreproducible due to poor code quality, and private admissions of climate scientist doubt in certain analyses while maintaining a public face of absolute certainty:
>1)http://camirror.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/willis-eschenbachs-...
>2)http://www.tickerforum.org/cgi-ticker/akcs-www?post=118625&#...
>3)http://camirror.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/john-mitchells-revi...