Yes, Climategate DOES discredit climate research

The files and e-mail exchanges from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at University of East Anglia are damning in several respects. What's readily apparent to anyone reading objectively is that CRU systematically engaged in a practice to stifle peer review of their work. This is a fact and not subject to dispute, and by itself ought to be sufficient to summarily dismiss any reports or recommendations coming from CRU.

Also readily apparent is advocacy for a specific outcome of their work. Take it away, AoSHQ:

> >From: Phil Jones [mailto:p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx]
> >Sent: 05 January 2009 16:18
> >To: Johns, Tim; Folland, Chris
> >Cc: Smith, Doug; Johns, Tim
> >Subject: Re: FW: Temperatures in 2009
> >
> >
> > Tim, Chris,
> > I hope you're not right about the lack of warming lasting
> > till about 2020. I'd rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office
> > press release with Doug's paper that said something like -
> > half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on
> > record, 1998!
> > Still a way to go before 2014.
> >
> > I seem to be getting an email a week from skeptics saying
> > where's the warming gone. I know the warming is on the decadal
> > scale, but it would be nice to wear their smug grins away.

Dammit...curse this global cooling! I want to wipe some "smug grins" off people's faces! Oh, and never mind the fact that 1998 was NOT the hottest year on record. That was 1934, but that hardly fits the anthropogenic global warming narrative. This reveals an emotional investment in a desired conclusion which is incompatible with objective, honest scientific inquiry.

As for CRU researchers deliberately manipulating data to fit their needs, it certainly appears that happened, but the evidence is - for now - less than conclusive. But what may be even worse than fudging the data is that...CRU evidently has no idea what their datasets represent.

First, a few things about that Fortran source code you've probably heard about. For the uninitiated, "source code" is the program code that a programmer actually types into a computer. It might look funny to someone who's not a programmer, but it's still readable by humans. The source code is then run through a compiler which converts the source code to machine-readable form for execution.

Fortran is a programming language whose name comes from "FORmula TRANslator". It's been around for a long time (I did a little bit of Fortran work in the mid-1980s back in my programming days when I had to do some complex life insurance rate calculations), and it's still commonly used by scientists in number-crunching applications. Unlike other programming languages, Fortran source code can be pretty cryptic, even to an experienced programmer. For this reason, it's common practice to extensively comment the source code (comments are ignored by the compiler) so that someone coming along later to make changes to the code can understand what the hell's going on. This is why the Fortran source code from CRU has those long-running comments sections. Like this one:

7. Removed 4-line header from a couple of .glo files and loaded them into Matlab. Reshaped to 360r x 720c and plotted; looks OK for global temp (anomalies) data. Deduce that .glo files, after the header, contain data taken row-by-row starting with the Northernmost, and presented as '8E12.4'. The grid is from -180 to +180 rather than 0 to 360. This should allow us to deduce the meaning of the co-ordinate pairs used to
describe each cell in a .grim file (we know the first number is the lon or column, the second the lat or row - but which way up are the latitudes? And where do the longitudes break? There is another problem: the values are anomalies, wheras the 'public' .grim files are actual values. So Tim's explanations (in _READ_ME.txt) are incorrect..

8. Had a hunt and found an identically-named temperature database file which did include normals lines at the start of every station. How handy - naming two different files with exactly the same name and relying on their location to differentiate! Aaarrgghh!! Re-ran anomdtb:

It doesn't take a programmer to read this and realize that the guy writing the code was faced with a bunch of climate data files, the structure of which was unknown. Picture opening up an Excel spreadsheet with column after column of numbers, and no column headers telling you what each column contains.

Think about all this as President Obama jets off to Copenhagen to discuss a global climate change treaty with other world leaders, and think about what Obama's climate czar, Carol Browner, had to say about the appalling evidence coming out of CRU:

Ms. Browner initially shrugged when asked about the e-mails, saying she didn't have a reaction. But when a reporter followed up, she said she will stick with the consensus of the 2,500 climate scientists on the International Panel on Climate Change who concluded global warming is happening and is most likely being pushed by human actions.

Wow. I'm sure glad that science is being returned to its rightful place in this administration.

Update: I can't believe I forgot to mention the conspiracy to circumvent FOIA requests.

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