The smartest men in the room ...

Not surprisingly, this is exactly the kind of crap (with an additional layer or twelve of obfuscation) that CA has detailed over and over.

Either these jackasses are the stereotypical scatterbrained ivory-tower eggheads misplacing their data along with their spectacles every fifteen minutes, or their zeal to avoid embarrassing FOIA requests by deleting files got the better of them.

Bre-X redux

Oh dear.

I feel his pain, I deal with "dirty data" all the time in my job, it's grim.

And heck, in my world people are trying to get at the truth because the truth has a $ prefix and if you get it wrong even slightly, you get fired, and maybe your company goes out of business.

What's funny is that there wasn't even an attempted to establish data set "v1.0" a nice clear, un-adulterated "let the chips fall where they may" data set that you can then brutalize in a systematic manner to get it to fit your assumptions and then release as v2.0 "the official corrected data". What kind of incompetence is this?

They are dealing with crap base data, piling crap corrections upon crap corrections, both in sign and in time, making dubious assumptions,and ignoring massive margins of error. My professors would have kicked my ass out of both my advanced degrees had I done that and drawn a conclusion that was not: "This is crap, at the least, we need better data, or better yet a new thesis topic."

It really makes me sad to think of the billions wasted on the research alone...

Like to give a big
"shout out"
to the hero that got this data onto the internet for public viewing, as it should have been all along.

Bravo, whoever you are.

And thanks Kate for doing what our puplicly funded-Liberal run newsmedia CBC will not do on this most important issue facing Canadians and the world.

Or maybe they're busy looking for a way to blame Bush, again, somehow, someway, eh?

Such a solid foundation to build the Global Scientific Consensus on.

After all, we are talking about changing the entire planetary economy and the future credibility of Climate Scientists, in fact the credibility of all Science, is on the line.

I for one will rest easy now that the basis for the consensus is Rock Solid.

I can feel a good night's sleep coming on.

I love the solution for arithmetic results that go beyond Fortran's bounds: just replace them with a static acceptable value, call it "fixed," and forge ahead!

----------

17. Inserted debug statements into anomdtb.f90, discovered that a sum-of-squared variable is becoming very, very negative!
. . .
forrtl: error (75): floating point exception
IOT trap (core dumped)

..so the data value is unbfeasibly large, but why does the sum-of-squares parameter OpTotSq go negative?!!

Probable answer: the high value is pushing beyond the single-precision default for Fortran reals?

. . .
Action: value replaced with -9999 and file renamed:

pre.0312031600H.dtb (to indicate I've fixed it)

.dts file also renamed for consistency.

anomdtb then runs fine!! Producing the usual txt files.

"Back to the gridding. 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.0"

DEAD IN THE GLOBAL WARMING GATE INFERNO...

Welcome to data Hades ladies and gentlemen, global climate terror is upon us.

And so rests the fate of the planet, on those who can't code FORTRAN because its "too late for me to fix it."

Cheers

Hans-Christian Georg Rupprecht, Commander in Chief

1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North"

More programming beauty (my bolds)

--------------

% Compiled module: RDBIN.
% Compiled module: STRIP.
yes
% Variable is undefined: NF.
% Execution halted at: RDBIN 68
. . .
So what is this mysterious variable 'nf' that isn't being set? Well strangely,it's in Mark N's 'rdbin.pro'. I say strangely because this is a generic prog that's used all over the place! Nonetheless it does have what certainly looks like a bug:
. . .
In other words, 'nf' is set in the first conditional set of statements, but in
the alternative (starting on #62) it is only set AFTER it's used (set #73,#74; used #68). So I shifted #73 and #74 to between #64 and #65, and..
with precompiling to pick up the local version of rdbin, too.. it worked!
Er, perhaps.

We're still not hearing much from "the science is in" crowd.
C'mon guys, were you all irradiated by the "mushroom cloud" as it was described by a real scientist rather than a tarot card reader?
No three cheers for the Nutley CRU?

Speaking of the Sound Of Hell Breaking Loose.

Here's another treasure trove of progressivism about to be acid dripped into the public domain.

Gawd this is a good time to be fighting the good fight . . .

http://tinyurl.com/yd9dnu3

Such capers are only confined to 'climate scientists'? Dream on ...

Their careers as Microsoft programmers are assured (my bolds):

------------

Ulp!

I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can't get far enough into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. 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.

I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections - to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more.

So what the hell can I do about all these duplicate stations? Well, how about fixdupes.for? That would be perfect - except that I never finished it, I was diverted off to fight some other fire. Aarrgghhh.

I - need - a - database - cleaner.

What about the ones I used for the CRUTEM3 work with Phil Brohan? Can't find the bugger!! Looked everywhere
. . .
I think the comment for *this* program sums it up nicely:

[the following are comments embedded in one of their Fortran programs - Matt]

' program postprocdupes2
c Further post-processing of the duplicates file - just to show how crap the
c program that produced it was! Well - not so much that but that once it was
c running, it took 2 days to finish so I couldn't really reset it to improve
c things. Anyway, *this* version does the following useful stuff:
c (1) Removes and squirrels away all segments where dates don't match;
c (2) Marks segments >5 where dates don't match;
c (3) Groups segments from the same pair of stations;
c (4) Sorts based on total segment length for each station pair'

You see how messy it gets when you actually examine the problem?

Expecting the MSM to expose this is as rational it as expecting the Waffen SS and/or Gestopo to support the coup following the attempt to assassinate Adolph Hitler.
Yeah.....we were much smarter then.....

Thanks big time, Kate, for the absolutely superb coverage here at SDA in the last couple of days. SDA is going to have a lot more impact than, say, the Star. I've seen in the past how certain issues have been, erm, forcefully inserted at the end of Kate's arm into various Canadian media - SDA does get results.

This Hadley story is another one of those watershed moments that prove the supremacy and, increasingly, influence of the blogosphere relative to the traditional media. Speaking of the media, Ed Driscoll has a great piece up - ""All The News That's Fit to Bury" at Pajamas media. Excerpt:

"Seeing as they each impact key pillars of what today passes for liberalism, there seems to be more than a few connections between the recent ACORN stings by Giles, O’Keefe and Breitbart, and the recent hacking of the emails of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit, or 'Global WarmingGate, as Charlie Martin dubs it elsewhere at Pajamas. Not the least is that they each sent the legacy media into full gatekeeper mode, hoping to prevent exciting, important news of current events from ever reaching their readers. Or perhaps, like the scandal last year involving John Edwards, sitting on the stories for so long, while making claims that they have to endlessly research them to verify their authenticity — Keep rockin’! — that when the legacy media decides to go 'public' with news that everyone already knows, they can dramatically dilute the ultimate impact of these stories."

Driscoll links to Candace Moore at NewsBusters, who writes about the way the legacy media moves the proverbial goalposts in an utterly shameless, straight-faced way:

"On November 22, while responding to the growing scandal about alleged proof that global warming is a hoax, the Times brushed it off with a puzzling claim that science should have no bearing on climate legislation." Moore notes that six weeks ago, the LA Times criticized George Bush for "hiding scientific data that could be used to sway the debate over the legislation...(...)...When scientific findings were there to warn that global warming would kill the planet, the Times was quick to support it; when science was later found to be riddled with tricks that tainted its credibility, climate legislation was suddenly all about fixing the economy."

Rand Simberg, also at Pajamas media:

"When scientists become politicians but continue to pretend to be doing science, that is the real crime. The theory being promoted by these men was being used to justify government actions that would result in greatly diminished future economic growth of the most powerful economy on earth (and the rest of the world as well). It would make it more difficult and less affordable to address any real problems that might be caused in the future by a change in climate, whether due to human activity or other causes. It could impoverish millions in the future, with little actual change in adverse climate effects. And when such a theory has the potential to do so much unjustified harm, and it has a fraudulent basis, who are the real criminals against humanity?"

Verily.

Oh man. I cannot keep up. This mushroom cloud is soooo HUGH!!!

Oh man. I cannot keep up. This mushroom cloud is soooo HUGH!!!
Posted by: Louise at November 23, 2009 2:52 PM

I hear you, Louise. I'm savoring every minute of this. These fraud artists have everything that's coming to them.

Only an elite academic would use so many words to state the obvious - DATA NFG.

I guess the NY Times must think it made a mistake with the Daniel Ellsberg leak of the Pentagon Papers. Sure!
Ideology trumps truth.

"This mushroom cloud is soooo HUGH!!!"

Boom de adda, Boom de adda,
Boom de adda, Boom de adda,
Boom de adda, Boom de adda,

I'm lovin it too.

Yup . . it is a good day. Too bad the CBC, the Star, the G&M, CTV haven't even clued into the story yet so more people could enjoy it.

Maybe they are too embarrassed from drinking the Al Gore/David Suzuki Kool-Aid for so many years, of being the mouthpiece for every AGW nutter & whackjob progressive who hated our modern world.

Or maybe they are just frik'n incompetent.

Not a peep out of them. Our Peepless MSM.

Mount Pinatubo!! This time with very selective and only metaphorical kills.

You know its bad when even AGW Believers are turning on The Team.

http://tinyurl.com/y9ogxqx

"Pielke's views are cogently expressed, coherent, backed up by numerous studies in the field--and to a considerable extent, they have been marginalized by critics from The Team, who viewed him as dangerous, to the extent that he could take the focus off their obsession, human emissions of CO2. It didn't matter that Pielke believes (and has often written) that human emissions of CO2 are a powerful factor. It didn't matter that he is as far from a skeptic as you can possibly be. It didn't matter that his academic credentials and publishing record rivalled, if not surpassed, their own.

The Team viewed Pielke (as they did so many others) as an enemy. The released emails contain references to him as an albatross, and tried to make hims seem like one who had lost all credibility"

I hope part of what's coming their way is jail time.

What Idd said.

1296!

ALL DISCUSSION of global warming, climate change, IPCC, tipping points, Copenhagen, CO2 emissions, cap & trade, ETS, etc., etc., ceases - NOW!

The UN (ugh!)is tasked to fund and set up 1296 super-duper surface temperature/CO2 reporting stations - on land and at sea. One station at the convergence of each 10 whole degrees Lat & Long. 36 X 36. Difficult, but doable.

All other, existing stations are shut down. Any station that falls into an existing Urban Heat Island is relocated (by consensus) to a nearby spot that qualifies for proper, uncontaminated recording, and is protected as such.

NASA or whomever is responsible for collecting atmospheric temperatures, funds and sets up the space equivalent recording points - above, below or in the "GHG" layer, wherever - but in consort with those 1296 points!

The ensuing 50-year record (pick a time frame) is transparently and universally broadcast from every state capitol in the world - daily, weekly, monthly, and reposited in a central data base.

Not one further red public cent, any time, anywhere, is channeled to anyone who may happen to have a theory or hypothesis with regard to AGW, CC, GHG, etc.

All existing pollution programs or regulations stay in effect, but are not enhanced or diminished. The world unfolds as it will for that time frame.

At the end of 50 (or whatever) years, the world will either be cooler, warmer or remain unchanged.

THEN we MAY or NOT want to do something about it.

The charlatan "warmers" will be unemployed; the "deniers" will go back to productive science; the rest of us can continue to smite each other about the head over religion, health care reform, voter fraud, multiculturalism, nuclear energy, immigration, racism, alternative energy, burkas or pandemics, i.e., sane topics of discourse!

GIGO

I'm once again going to quote the great physicist (and equally great philosopher of science) Richard Feynman: "If you make a theory...you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it....the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another."

That is exactly what the climate science "experts" have avoided doing for the past twenty years or so.

Even if everything turns up roses, there are a whole lot of people who have staked their $$ and credibility on AGW, of which the majority of the main stream media. Considering the MSM will be trying tooth and nail to avoid an embarrassment of epic proportions, expect the inertia on this boulder of truth to be too great....for now anyways.

And not a whimper out of the Drive-By Media.

Hans, don't worry I still work with Fortran.
,

This file is probably the most useful in showing the potential problems with temperature data. The paucity of documentation for the data files and their transformations is completely unacceptable.

I started programming in FORTRAN 40 years ago and, when I was doing research, I created some pretty bad code which I absolutely cannot comprehend when I look at it now. Even a few years after I threw together a large program over a couple of days it would be easier to write a new one rather than trying to figure out what I'd done after being awake for 24 hours straight coding.

One thing which I _always_ did was document in excruciating detail what the format of the data files was. Programs are easy to write but data from experiments is unique. Every experimental data file had reams of text indicating if I'd changed the format of the data file (which would happen often as the experiments were concurrent with major software development occurring) and exactly what was happening with the data as the experiment was in progress. The idea was that anyone coming in to look at the data would know exactly what had transpired and could write their own code to analyze the results if they didn't like the programs I'd written. This is what eventually ended up happening when I left research to go into medical school. I got a lot of flak about my coding style but none about how I'd documented the data.

Such lack of documentation of data files is completely unacceptable. Given the potential effect of the results of CRU analyses on public policy, this omission may also be criminal in nature.

And yet:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091123/ap_on_sc/sci_climate_09_post_kyoto

jcl ... wow, talk about whistling past the graveyard, eh?

Please, everyone, post this to your Facebook sites and links on your blogs. If we keep hammering it out there, people will have to listen.

I'm going to start sending all the links to my MP in Canada and my Senator and Representative in the US congress.

In this morning's FoxNews interview between Chris Horner at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Howard Gould of the Clean Economy network...
In this interview, I heard Chris Horner say "there's 62mb released and 100mb to come". Has anyone come across this claim elsewhere, or does he have privileged information? - or did he just misspeak?

A good organization specs everything out - data, code, and processes - ahead of time and peer reviews (ha!) and validates them before a single key is pressed. Same with any and all changes.

Check out how many times the guy writes "I wrote a program." These guys were flying by the seats of their pants.

Is there ever going to be a movie made about this scam starring all the celebrities who drive electric cars?

I'd like to up that

'shout out'

Idd and Indiana Homez.

Thanks for the link to yet another Acorn rot Fred. Talk about fires to put out - the left- wing bedwetters will be busy calling 911 whilst dodging flying Polar Bears!

OOPS!! Was that a Polar Bear or M. Moore?? If it looks like a duck......

A good day, Indeed.

Mississauga Matt writes:
A good organization specs everything out - data, code, and processes - ahead of time and peer reviews (ha!) and validates them before a single key is pressed. Same with any and all changes.

Matt, this indicates you've never worked in a research setting. Writing software was a process that took time away from doing experiments and they were done as quickly as possible. This meant usually no documentation, keeping variable names short (3 characters or preferably less) to save on typing and structured code was something that real programmers didn't do. My code was a maze of GOTO's and computed GOTO's and once it worked that was the end of the process and there was no reason to document as I remembered what I'd done. I was happiest coding in assembler and my FORTRAN code was setup to ensure that the memory requirements were as small as possible as everything had to fit into a 50 Kb memory space.

These programs were for use of the researchers in the lab I worked in only. I documented my assembly language code quite extensively as this was something I was proud of and would share as I think it was as optimal as one could get on a PDP-11 and the hardware configuration we were running.

When I left the lab the next programmer that came in rewrote all of the programs as he couldn't figure out my code. He was a structured programming type of guy and it took him weeks to do what I'd done in hours. The rewrite would have been necessary even if I'd stayed in the lab as the code was ported first to a Sun workstation and later to IBM PC's. There was far too much hardware specific stuff in my code (display on VT55 or VT100 terminals) to allow reuse of the code anyway.

Imagine the hue and cry from the left had this sort of behaviour occurred at a pharmaceutical company in an attempt to market a drug.
The company would have been, rightly, thoroughly investigated, its stocks would have plummeted and it would have very likely faced bankruptcy as all its products were withdrawn from the shelves pending the outcome of the investigation.
But hey, I guess snake oil isn't covered by consumer protection laws.

jcl, I've noticed several soppy, heart-string pullers in the media in the last week or so. In some of them, the exploitation is so blatantly obvious I can't help think there must be a planned campaign by some (probably UN supported) agency to turn the Copenhagen delegates into simpering, weeping piles of jello. These are very interesting times. When the propaganda machinery stoops to such in your face unveiled tear-jerking, you just know they have lost.

Agreed loki.

I'm not a programmer but there were a few prerequisite programming courses I needed for school because I'm heavily involved in CAD.

If a program isn't documented line-by-line then it's garbage, even if it's working. Only the fact the programmers didn't have a paying customer to whom they're accountable enabled them get away with this. A paying customer would never accept this type of garbage.

btw, I dislike programming very much, although I feel someone fluent in programming languages should be able to claim multi-lingual status.

Dr. Tim Ball provides a well-written, inciteful comment at the Climateaudit mirror website under the topic "Curry: On the credibility of climate research". It is located about 20 comments from the top. Well worth the read.

Embedded is this juicy tidbit about the documentary "The Greenhouse Conspiracy":

"The movie was rejected by PBS in the US on the grounds it was biased. In Canada I understand David Suzuki kept it off the CBC".

See: http://camirror.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/curry-on-the-credibility-of-climate-research/

Nuff said!

Indy,

As they say "if the code and the comments don't match, they're probably both wrong....".

HAAAAAAAAA-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! This just keeps getting better and better :)

btw, I believe the term is "programming etiquette" wrt proper programming style and documentation.

I'm really comfortable about the idea of giving these C students absolute control of the global economy. Why not also elect a social worker as president and give him absolute control of the U.S. military?

These are wonderful ideas that will bring about a golden age of peace and prosperity -- in China.

Ratt, Dr D., loki,

Yes, I remember doing machine language and Fortran. How did these "researchers" make it past 100 level comp sci?

The data sets and programs look to be completely "knackered".

Maybe we can be saved by a "RATT", because this viper's nest of data poison probably needs some serious anti-venom medication.

But its probably too late to resurrect the AGW theory as it got consumed in Dante's GLOBAL WARMING GATE INFERNO above...

Cheers

Hans-Christian Georg Rupprecht, Commander in Chief

1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North"

How is the AGW cultists, the MSM and the political world dealing with these revelations?

They are ignoring it. Totally ignoring it. Business as usual. Quebec has just announced a 'massive attack on greenhouse gases'; remember, Quebecers will adopt any policy that might, just might, bring them federal funds...which they can then use as they wish for other projects.

Copenhagen continues. CNN talks about the millions lost due to rising sea levels. Only FOX has referred to it. The Blogs are filled with the scam...but the 'Other World' ignores it.

"My code was a maze of GOTO's and computed GOTO's" a.k.a. "job security"

ET: "...but the 'Other World' ignores it."

Not sure about that. The truly stupid are carrying on like nothing happened. But I have every faith in a politician's sense of self-preservation ... they are testing the wind.

monkton weighs in

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/viscount-monckton-on-global-warminggate-they-are-criminals-pjm-exclusive/

Indiana Homez writes:
If a program isn't documented line-by-line then it's garbage, even if it's working.

That degree of commenting is a tad excessive although I agree that if one is writing a program for a paying customer then they have the right to know exactly what the source code does, especially if some neat hacks have been used in the code. BTW I always document my neat hacks as they seem far less obvious 10 years after I've written the program.

When I was doing research my main contact with people for assistance was with electrical engineers as there was a lot of hardware design involved also. At the time the engineers had complete disdain for computer science students as they were obsessed with producing pretty code and documenting the obvious. An engineer or a results oriented programmer could produce a working program 10-100x faster than a computer science graduate.

I think the key is knowing if the program is going to be used only once (to convert data from one tape format to another when the data acquisition program changes) or will be used multiple times and potentially extended. For one time use programs there is no reason to document. For a program that will be used by other people or extended then clarity is a virtue.

As someone who has no problem reading code and figuring out what it does, I find comments often very irritating and as annoying as text which has two languages intermixed (like many Canadian bilingual documents). What I remembered after my last post was that I had paper documentation for all of my code as I hadn't gotten to the point where I am now of just entering code directly into an editor to implement an algorithm. 30 years ago I would have a final flowchart of the program I was going to write and would translate the flowchart into a program or digital logic depending on which was the most efficient way to perform a given algorithm. I also had at least a few pages written showing what the program did and I never typed it in as it was primarily pictorial with a few text annotations. Interestingly, my handwriting back then was far more legible than now.

One thing that strikes me about the CRU code is that it is NOT easy to read and the impenetrability of the code was what got me reminiscing about my early programming days. (I get the same feeling when I look at my 30 year old FORTRAN code). At least 30 years ago I had the excuse that on a 2.5 Mb disk drive there was little room for extraneous comments (and disk packs cost a couple of hundred dollars each) and the convolutions necessary to fit the code into the tiny PDP11 address space seem quaint now.

CRU programmers can't use these excuses as they are using Linux boxes and Beowulf clusters. The machines they program on probably have a few Gb of RAM and disk storage measured in hundreds of Gb. There is absolutely no penalty for adding comments to code now; if one doesn't fee like typing one can always dictate the comments and store the result as a WAV file in the same directory as the program.

Too bad you don't like programming Indiana as I enjoy it as much now as when I first started 40+ years ago. If it paid as much as medicine I'd go back to doing it full time in an instant. Now it's just a hobby that I indulge in when I have the time.

Only one term works for this HadleyCRU gang:

FUBAR!

Glenn Beck is all over this this afternoon. Even reading off an email that named himself.... heh heh!

From: Michael Mann
To: Andrew Revkin
Subject: Re: mcintyre's latest....
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:11:03 -0400

All they have to do is put it up on their blog, and the contrarian noise machine
kicks into gear, pretty soon Druge, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and their ilk (in this case,
The Telegraph were already on it this morning) are parroting the claims.

tried to search 'Hadley Centre' on cbc news.

Guess what happened?

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&channel=s&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=O7h&q=Hadley+Centre+site%3Acbc.ca&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=

The lengthy and informed debate in the comments under the post at ww's (4:21) link are well worth reading.

"That degree of commenting is a tad excessive although"

Touché

Fair enough, that being said, someone can be disingenuous and have a program output almost anything. A program that outputs a desired result through a rats nest of who knows what is worthless IMO. I suppose it's akin to the correct answer for a math problem without documentation. Although the answer may be correct, without the work you can't verify if it's correct on merit, by fluke or by shenanigans.

Anyways, a few macros here and there is the extent of my programming prowess. I didn't own a PC until my first year of school so I struggled mightily in classes that others thought were a waste of time ie... hardware, programming, networking ect. Seriously, I had to be shown "right click, left click” I was so green, but because I was a strong math/physics student I was able to cope. Today I say "take a number" when I'm harassed for my tech skills. Perhaps under different circumstances I might have enjoyed that aspect of my education.

"If it paid as much as medicine I'd go back to doing it full time in an instant."

But I thought doctors were in the biz to help people. You must be one of those "capitalist doctors" Owebumma loathes. I'll be sure to check that my tonsils are still intact after the next time I see you. (kidding)

Mann on Mann: uber-left GuardianUK.

Mann: ""I hope it boomerangs back on the criminals.""
...-

"Michael Mann, director of the earth system science centre at the University of Pennsylvania, and a long-term target of sceptics, agreed the timing was suspicious.

"What appears to have happened is that going into this monumental climate summit in a couple of weeks the other side, which does not favour taking action to combat climate change, resorted to an illegal smear campaign," he said.

"They are going through them and cherry-picking them for any word they can find that is cited out of context and can appear incriminating. I think it's despicable."

He told the Guardian the emails – though embarrassing – did not undermine the body of science. "This doesn't make any difference at all in degree of consensus on climate change," Mann said. "I hope it boomerangs back on the criminals.""

"Climate change email hacking to be looked into by University of East Anglia

• Online publication seized on by denial bloggers
• No evidence that data was falsified, says Met Office"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/23/climate-change-emails-uea

The word "geoengineering" really stands out. Go read Melanie Phillips.

Just for comparison, a business compiling information to conform to their environmental permit would never get away with such sloppy work. Just imagine the scandal if an oilsands co. refused to report their enviro data, fudged the results, had zero document control and then claim they lost their initial readings. The media, political outrage and bad PR would be the least of their problems - there would be fines and an immediate enviro audit.

Thanks for all of the info Kate, I posted your most recent with a link back at the Flop and Wail earlier, it was deleted right away, then I posted your most recent again without the link and it was still there and with a post from "katewerk" right above, wonders never cease to amaze.

Cheers

"*BBC sat on Hacked CRU climate emails for a month!!!"
...-

"'Climategate' - CRU hacked into and its implications

Paul Hudson | 13:07 UK time, Monday, 23 November 2009

Very busy with forecast duties right now, but I do intend to write a blog regarding the UK Climate research centre (CRU) being hacked into, and the possible implications of this very serious affair.

I will add comment on this page as soon as I can free up some time. But I will in the meantime answer the question regarding the chain of e-mails which you have been commenting about on my blog, which can be seen here, and whether they are genuine or part of an elaborate hoax.

I was forwarded the chain of e-mails on the 12th October, which are comments from some of the worlds leading climate scientists written as a direct result of my article 'whatever happened to global warming'. The e-mails released on the internet as a result of CRU being hacked into are identical to the ones I was forwarded and read at the time and so, as far as l can see, they are authentic.

More later."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/2009/11/climategate-cru-hacked-into-an.shtml

"*BBC sat ..."
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2392924/posts

Some interesting stuff here:

http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11420

"He told the Guardian the emails – though embarrassing – did not undermine the body of science. "This doesn't make any difference at all in degree of consensus on climate change," Mann said. "I hope it boomerangs back on the criminals.""

well he can't forecast the climate but let's all hope he clearly see his future.

Fred:

Interesting that Mann calls those who exposed this information criminals (hackers).

Wonder what the British taxpayers, who have funded this criminal activity to the tune of 13.5 billion pounds, would think of the resistance to Freedom of Information as to where their dollars are going?

"Wonder what the British taxpayers, who have funded this criminal activity to the tune of 13.5 billion pounds, would think"

Set you Free . . .Once they snap out of their brain washed trance, they'll be thinking that's a whole lot of pints at their local they can't afford and will be truly "upset"

Maybe the CliamteGate hooligans will take up where the Football hooligans left off.

Looks like Canada's real media outlets will not let this story die, unlike CTV, CBC, G&M, the Red Star and their ilk.

http://www.howestreet.com/articles/index.php?article_id=11604

COMPLETELY OFF-TOPIC BUT TOO FUNNY TO WAIT

Lou Dobbs is considering running for president.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2009/11/23/2009-11-23_excnn_anchor_lou_dobbs_is_considering_running_for_president_in_2012.html

I am reading the ommetns of Asimov here:

http://www.tickerforum.org/cgi-ticker/akcs-www?post=118625&page=13

I spent Saturday evening (OK I don't have a life) casting an eye over harry_read_me.txt and came to very much the same view as Asimov.

If you look at the date, it may be that the TIP-TOP Climate Scientists delegated the task of reconstructing the original data (which they realized they had lost:) to a student - who rightly got V.PO'd!! Perhaps he is the secret agent man.

Loki - been at it for a while, eh? You kinda forgot that punch cards were the main reason for short variable names and limited comments. IIRC, F77 had a 6 character limit on variable/subroutine/etc names ... I never had to get close to the limit.

NOW ... I'm willing to entertain the idea that the "Science is Settled" and the "Debate is Over".....

Waiting fore Suzuki to pop his head up.

Anyone seen Suzuki since this broke? Has his melon-head exploded yet? And do we taxpayers get to recoup all the money cbc has paid this moron for all his enviro-crap for how many years??

Suzuki and Gore were supposed to appear together for a forum at CBC's Q Studio on Wednesday, has it been canceled?

Goreacle Report: caw...caw...caw...buzzcawcaw >>>
(Couldn't resist the caws....)

Q: "*"Will Al Gore Be Eating Crow?"

Wall Street Journal: The two Canadians: Mc and Mc.

Bravo to Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick.
...-

"Global Warming With the Lid Off

The emails that reveal an effort to hide the truth about climate science.

'The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. . . . We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind."

So apparently wrote Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) and one of the world's leading climate scientists, in a 2005 email to "Mike." Judging by the email thread, this refers to Michael Mann, director of the Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center. We found this nugget among the more than 3,000 emails and documents released last week after CRU's servers were hacked and messages among some of the world's most influential climatologists were published on the Internet.

The "two MMs" are almost certainly Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, two Canadians who have devoted years to seeking the raw data and codes used in climate graphs and models, then fact-checking the published conclusions—a painstaking task that strikes us as a public and scientific service. Mr. Jones did not return requests for comment and the university said it could not confirm that all the emails were authentic, though it acknowledged its servers were hacked.

Yet even a partial review of the emails is highly illuminating. In them, scientists appear to urge each other to present a "unified" view on the theory of man-made climate change while discussing the importance of the "common cause"; to advise each other on how to smooth over data so as not to compromise the favored hypothesis; to discuss ways to keep opposing views out of leading journals; and to give tips on how to "hide the decline" of temperature in certain inconvenient data."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704888404574547730924988354.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
...-

"*Will Al Gore Be Eating Crow?

When big money makers are involved in policies that can change the way every individual on the earth thinks, there will always be a few sceptics working on disproving the facts and figures that drive these written policies. We all know that Global Warming and carbon tax formulas shaped by the fact that everyone on this planet is responsible for the carbon gases emitted into our atmosphere is being construed by our world leaders today, but in light of the recent news, this might all change!

According to many news sources around the world, someone hacked in to the files of the Climatic Research Unit based at the University of East Anglia. Apparently 61 megabytes of information was downloaded and posted onto the World Wide Web. Phil Jones Director of this research facility has acknowledged the fact that files are theirs. These files contain papers, documents, letters, and emails that outline information about manipulation of climate science data and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s involvement. The (CRU) Climate Research Unit and Al Gore have close ties and the information based out of this institution plays a big role in Al Gore’s determination to tax carbon and collect money from everyone on this planet that emits carbon gases.

The next question is, will the data and results from 10 years of scientific “number fudging”, manipulation, and corruption be further scrutinized or will all this be swept under the big red bureaucratic rug? In light of all this, I wonder how they will treat the hackers that exposed these hidden files to the rest world."

http://www.thesudburystar.com/Community/NewsDisplay.aspx?c=33660

But what will Rumpy Pumpy Dumpty, EMPEROR of the EU PEOPLE, do in Copenhagen? Do you think his advisors have advised him that "Global Warming" is a crock? Will he demand immediate execution of the Hadley Crew ... and a few non-Europeans to boot?

...keeping fingers crossed :^)

Its a glorious day in the neighborhood!!!!
Leprechauns with Unicorns are disappearing everywhere.
Nary a guitar in sight or Koo-Aide in place to drink.
Could it be the reign of the Climate Space Reptiles is over?
I love watching false prophets of pseudo-science. With even bigger lying "Teachers" being exposed. Top bad so much harm has been done to Nations plus the economy. Particularly to real environmental problems that we face . All in disrepute now.
Such is the usual end of phantoms in the night.
Y2K anyone? Any bets on 2012?
JMO

"Globally the temperature has risen by almost one degree celsius over the past century so that actually means there is no natural weather left.
"The weather outside your window at the moment is man-made and we don't seem to be doing a very good job of it, do we?"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/8373308.stm

Good grief.

"Globally the temperature has risen by almost one degree celsius over the past century so that actually means there is no natural weather left.
"The weather outside your window at the moment is man-made and we don't seem to be doing a very good job of it, do we?"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/8373308.stm

Good grief.

idd,
"what our puplicly funded-Liberal run newsmedia CBC will not do"

and the CTV News today?
I watched for about a half hour, did I miss something? Probably the biggest News story...ever, that's all.

loki, indiana, et al:

I remember doing FORTRAN on punch cards. Hell, I remember doing LISP on punch cards. ((((((That's hard)))))) especially when the ribbons on the keypunch machines are worn thinner than Bambam's excuses. I didn't spend a whole lot of time on documentation then.

But now, working in a corporate setting, where I know requirements are going to change frequently, I document everything, especially neat little "tricks" that help me accomplish things faster and with less code, but will GOTO hell in a handbasket if the data structure changes.

Even SQL, which is pretty much self documenting, still needs a discussion of the database structure. It would just be like those dBA's to change the file formats, add a new field, etc., and NOT TELL ANYONE ABOUT IT! Not that that's ever happened to me, though...

I haven't a freakin' clue what any of you are talking about; however, I think I like (a lot) whatever it is I think you're talking about.

Faster than the MSM -

http://www.cafepress.com.au/hidethedecline

Wafergate = instant Canadian MSM coverage. Long term effect: ZERO.

Climategate = willful ignorance by Canadian MSM. Long term effect: the hollowing out of the Canadian economy.

I don't know, I guess the less we know the better for the MSM.

Cooking the Books on 'Global Warming?' Are the Numbers Fudged?

http://www.nowpublic.com/environment/cooking-books-global-warming-are-numbers-fudged

There was a warm period in the 1700's?

Reuters comes through with the best lede ever.

"Hacked climate e-mails awkward, not game change"

Tooooooo fuuuuuuny.

Line-by line comments are seldom needed, but if the code is insanely complicated, by all means put 'em in. But at a minimum, each function and routine should have a standard header showing

Purpose and method
variables used
branch points, if any
author, date, etc, plus explanations and names for any mods.

Exactly blanks, at November 23, 2009 8:13 PM

Cannot personally attest that CTV has not covered it on TV today, I don't watch them at all anymore.

CBC is what I monitor or check in on, as that's what our tax dollars are paying for - unbiased relevant news. They are suppose to be the unbiased news source for all Canadians, but obviously they are not.

FIRE.THEM.ALL.

It's not right that we have to pay for the voice of the LIbEral party of Canada, bad enough we're forced to support the bloq party of Quebec, financially.

I would love to see Jim Prentice bait the opposition with these leaked emails. Predictably they'll howl and the MSM will jump all over it. It would be my hope that in all the MSM coverage the public will start to wonder if they've been had by politicians, the MSM, and those useful idiots at the CRU.

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=2188feb3-802a-23ad-4de4-3fbc0a92e126&Issue_id

Druge has this up right now.
From the U.S. Senate Committee Environmental and Pulic Works site.
Inhofe Says He Will Call for Investigation on "Climategate" on Washington Times Americas Morning Show.

I have to think that The Conservatives, the Sun and National Post are all "slow playing" this. Instead of diving in and making a big stink sometimes it's best to drag it out for a long time. The Liberals are waiting for the big hit because they were 100% behind the global warming scam. I'd rather see them die of a thousand cuts than a stake to the heart.

Get your ducks in a row and make them squirm. It will do far more damage than 1 big newspaper headline.

"Suzuki and Gore were supposed to appear together for a forum at CBC's Q Studio on Wednesday, has it been canceled?"

When something gets this much attention online and then is TOTALLY ignored by the CBC, there is a problem. It leads me to conclude that the CBC is more interested in manipulating the news than reporting fairly.(Nothing new, I guess -- I am just a bit surprised at how blatant this is.) I am less concerned about other outlets whom I don't fund with tax dollars.

Maybe they are embarassed because of the scheduled program on Wednesday -- no matter -- even a small, obscure story would help them appear more balanced. Too late for them to save face, I would say -- unless they are willing to tackle this directly in the questions to Gore and Suzuki.

Bruce,

David Suzuki and Al Gore are still both listed on CBC's Q schedule for Nov 25th.

What's even better is I find this gem:
http://www.cbc.ca/q/blog/

Q Blog
November 18, 2009
Ask Al Gore and David Suzuki...


As you may have heard, on Wednesday (Nov. 25) Q has the privilege hosting two of the most prominent environmental activists and spokespeople in the world: former U.S. vice-president Al Gore and scientist and broadcaster Dr. David Suzuki. They will be here together in Studio Q.


And we'd like you to get in on this unique conversation.


If you have a question for Al Gore and David Suzuki, we'd love to hear it. If you had a chance to address these two, what's the single most pressing question that you would you ask them?

David Suzuki and Al Gore are still both listed on CBC's Q schedule for Nov 25th.

Is a lynch mob asking too much? I'd settle for tar and feathers then rode out of town on a rail.

Hanging is probably too good for them.

It looks like the climate psychophants are getting desperate.

The Moonbat himself doubts:

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/

Sorry, can't find the primary link but a trip to the UK Guardian newspaper website (shudder) should do the trick. Hey, anyone can do a trick; a whore can do a trick. I prefer real whores to climate whores.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125902685372961609.html

Congress investigates the emails!

Enter, stage left: O'lOner.....

"*...return with us now to those thrilling days" ...-

BBC asks: Can Obama Save the Planet?

Yup, that’s the title of a documentary on BBC2 on Wednesday. Here’s the puff:

Justin Rowlatt reports on whether President Obama is on target to keep his climate-change promises.

Travelling across the States, using public transport only, Justin encounters coal miners and car manufacturers; activists and politicians; a pig farmer and a film star. He goes ice-fishing in Michigan, finds a thriving wind industry in the oil state of Texas and, in Detroit, drives a test car of the future.

The film reveals two very different sides of America – the people who agree with their president that the US should be leading the world on tackling global warming, and those who see Obama’s plans as an attack on their liberties. And it’s not surprising that, in this divided America, the president’s push to limit greenhouse gas emission has become stuck in the mud of Washington politics.

Not having seen the film, I have no idea which of the “different sides” of America Rowlatt identifies with. I’ve never been able to work out what the BBC makes of Barack Obama, and I can only deplore the implication of the vulgar cartoon that the Biased BBC website is running today:" (tOOn)

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100017668/bbc-asks-can-obama-save-the-planet/
(*H/Tonto)

inB at November 23, 2009 8:13 PM

Lisp on punchcards? Bloody hell, that's clever. I had the bracket completions of EMACS, also written in Lisp if I recall.

BTW Does anyone realize that the editor used in MS Visuaql C/Basic/Whatever is the Brief editor?? I guess they bought them out, for a tidy sum I'm sure.

maz2 at November 23, 2009 9:50 PM

Maz, I expect that the BBC looks down their nose at The One, as they do all Americans. This is their snobbery; this is why I left the UK for Canada. I found Liberakl snopbbnery here, but I digress. The BBC will never pay an outright compliment to an American, even if they want the cream; it will alsways be sideways. It'sd a British Snob thing; N.Americans don't understand the inmferiority complex of a failed people.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/nov/23/global-warming-leaked-email-climate-scientists

Monbiot here.

George is changing his surname from Moonbat to Monbiot.

His satire is pathetic.

But, we should give him some room for these words:

"It's no use pretending this isn't a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I'm dismayed and deeply shaken by them."

this CRU fudging is, how can I put this, PERVERSE.

5 years from now and more IT professionals, academics, bloggers, some journalists, climatologists, historians are going to be still talking about the CRU cockup.

I joined university of western ontario in 1971 as a mainframe computer operator and went on to manage a PC retail store and teach college.

this CRU leak represents ALL that can go 'worng' in data analysis but even *beyond* that. unlike the old days when a misplaced parenthesis could crash the computer, when system analysts agonized over data type conversion, THIS is WILLFUL CALCULATED AND DELIBERATE effort to massage the numbers.

there will be books written and heads WILL roll.

mygod what have they done. what have they done. fraud, deception, lies, subterfuge, on and on.

any word yet who the hacker is?

ldd, Senator Inhofe will have the power to subpoena witnesses from the United States. I think Prof. Micheal Mann will have a lot of splaining to do.

I can see the questions now: "Prof. Mann, did you delete any emails or data knowing that a freedom of information request will soon be presented to you?"

Maybe we could get a joint US-UK-Canada hearings with Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick as the Canadian witnesses.

Update:

Google search results: Foi2009.zip
Thursday: 18
Friday: 1080
Monday: 5610

If you have not got your copy yet (via bit torrent):

http://www.mininova.org/tor/3168330

Woops, Thursday result should be 19.

Curious and others.....

I know it's been posted before but....

I think we should call him/her a whistle blower, not a hacker.

My 2 cents to an unbelievable story. Like really. If I made this up last week would you believe it could happen?

Wall Street Journal is reporting that U.S. legislators are going to investigate.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125902685372961609.html

"Congressional Republicans have started investigating climate scientists whose hacked emails suggest they tried to squelch dissenting views about global warming".

So. Sweet.

RW @ 9"43, at least they are honest about what their aim is.

Is this the point where some idiot say's the dog ate my computer.

Jeff K, yes thanks for posting that reminder. I mentioned this in one of the previous Hell-Breaking-Loose threads, but it bears repeating. The person responsible for the 'leak' is not a hacker, but a whistle-blower.

IMO.

I maintain very large FORTRAN programs as a small part of my employment responsibilities. I must say than there are much better technologies available for complex programs rather than FORTRAN which is a dead language.

I would argue that no new work should be implemented in FORTRAN.

With regards to AGW, it has nothing to do with science. It is pure politics and we are losing. I would suggest people take a much stronger approach in fighting it before things come to open warfare.

Trust no one and check everything!

My $0.02

FORTRAN
havent used that since the days of the finite element method.

"You will wonder why we are even contemplating restructuring the world economy and wasting trillions of dollars on the say-so of data this bad."

Yeah, no f#*king kidding!!!!

Fellow.Canadian: thanks for the CBC link. Here's the question I left and we'll see if it makes the list.
I'd like to know if you had any inside knowledge of the huge fraud being perpetrated by the climate "scientists" which was recently unearthed through the dissemination of the CRU emails last weekend? Given that the earth's climate has been cooling for 10-15 years despite steadily increasing CO2 levels are you still prepared to mislead the Canadian public about a trace gas that is essential for life on earth? Are you aware of the far greater dangers to life on earth of potential asteroid collisions and how the process of deindustrialization that the two of you are proposing would eliminate any possibility of humans preventing such a catastrophe?

Good to see that there's a lot of ex-FORTRAN programmers out there. Lorenzo, I wouldn't call FORTRAN a dead language yet. There's a huge amount of FORTRAN code that is open source, especially mathematical routines, that are a lot easier to incorporate into a FORTRAN program than to try to call from another language. I know how to do it, I just want to minimize the number of steps involved to get a working program. What finally got me off FORTRAN was first Hypercard on the Mac which made for very easy creation of forms and then I settled on VB which is now a "dead" language thanks to M$ stupidity. M$ is forcing people like me to go to Linux because there is no way I'm going to do a complete rewrite of my large codebase in VB to VB.NET. The few programs that I tried this on were so frustrating in terms of the vast amount of code that needed changing that I decided if I was going to go to an interpreted language it would be to Java.

What I do find incomprehensible is that someone would still write code the way I used to write it 30 years ago. FORTRAN is far more structured than it used to be and there is no excuse for writing unstructured code that is not expected to execute in a hard realtime system and runs on machines of todays incredible power. The only thing that would make sense is that someone at CRU was very lazy and had the FORTRAN code from the early 80's and couldn't be bothered to hire someone to recode it in another language. C has been around almost as long as FORTRAN and is more portable. Given the size of the grants that the people at CRU had over the last decade surely they could have sprung for a programmer or two; of course this might mean missing a conference in Tahiti. This would have resulted in fixing some of the bugs that were pointed out in the document which was the start of this thread.

The other possibility is that they stuck with FORTRAN knowing that it's only aging programmers like myself who have much experience with the language and usually we're way too busy to go through their code line by line to look for problems. By leaving the code maintenance to a grad student who's only knowledge of FORTRAN prior to dealing with the code was from a web page on the history of computing, they're going to create problems with data getting lost. This gives them a convenient scapegoat should something like the release of the CRU emails happen.

And speaking of legacy languages, while poking around in the DLL's of my current medical billing program I determined that large chunks of it were written in COBOL! I assumed that this language had died decades ago as the only thing I thought it was good for was string manipulation of which there is very little in scientific computing. Also, while reorganizing my storage room this weekend I ran across 2 boxes of programs on punched cards that I had saved for some 40 years now and a paper tape of the same era. Fortunately I'd transferred these programs to a reel of 8 track tape which was an archival medium which would be around forever:-;

I hung around computational scientists several years ago (conferences and such). They mostly use Fortran, which has now been updated to Fortran 2003, with some parallel capabilities being proposed for the next version. LinPack (linear equations) is a major library written in Fortran. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran

At the time I noticed that many comp sci people assume that only comp sci people do programming (and that therefore only those languages in use by comp sci people are popular). Not true, by a long shot.

And I learned that some computational scientists are clueless when it comes to algorithms and data structures, let alone anything to do with software engineering (version control, change management, requirements analysis, qa and testing, etc etc). And they innocently/disdainfully believe that comp sci people must be dunces to spend so many years studying, since (to them) all one has to do is pick up a language manual and start coding...

My guess is that the East Anglia CRU scientists and doctoral candidates believe that when programming all one needs to do is pick up a language manual and start coding. If so, then the shoddy code and dubious data would not be surprising.

And then of course there are the temptations of (grant) money, honours and power.

This* seems to fit the beginning of the end of George's AGW-fixation: Gaia's legacy.

O'Gaia O'George: there is a parallel.

"*This is his sole legacy: a massive post-traumatic stress disorder."
...-

"Monbiot issues an unprecedented apology – calls for Jones resignation

From Andrew Bolt, my “mate” down under at the Herald Sun, comes this surprise. I’ll have to say, it is to George Monbiot’s credit to do this. I embrace his first statement, because it succinctly sums up the situation:

It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging(1). I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.

- George Monbiot on his personal blog"

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/23/monbiot-issues-an-unprecedented-apology/#comments
...-

*O'narcissist:

"The "small people", the "rank and file", the "loyal soldiers" of the narcissist - his flock, his nation, his employees - they pay the price. The disillusionment and disenchantment are agonizing. The process of reconstruction, of rising from the ashes, of overcoming the trauma of having been deceived, exploited and manipulated - is drawn-out. It is difficult to trust again, to have faith, to love, to be led, to collaborate. Feelings of shame and guilt engulf the erstwhile followers of the narcissist. This is his sole legacy: a massive post-traumatic stress disorder."

http://www.globalpolitician.com/25109-barack-obama-elections

Kate,

Great line at the end. Really highlights whats on the table.

Terence Corcoran at the National Post has the story. In fact the National Post has one full page devoted to climategate with Corcoran's story linked on page 1.
Here's the link to Corcoran.
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/11/23/terence-corcoran-after-copenhagen-the-end-of-the-science.aspx

We should all be thankful that PMSH and Jim Prentice had the sense to not drink at the trough of koolaid the liberals, NDP & blockheads are swilling from.