April 15, 2010

Color me surprised - NOT!

From the Washington Post:
Academic experts clear scientists in 'climate-gate'
In the second of three investigations of the scandal known as "climate-gate," a panel of academic experts said Wednesday that several prominent climate scientists did not engage in deliberate malpractice but did not use the best statistical tools available to produce their findings.

The University of East Anglia's Climactic Research Unit has been under intense scrutiny since November, when hackers posted more than 1,000 pirated e-mails and a raft of other documents that highlight the scientists' hostility toward global warming skeptics. But the review -- which follows a British parliamentary review that defended the institution's research but faulted its tendency to withhold information -- did nothing to bridge the divide between many climate researchers and their critics.

After interviewing staff members and analyzing 11 peer-reviewed articles published between 1986 and 2008, the panel concluded: "We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it."

They also said it was "very surprising" that the researchers did not work more closely with statisticians. But, they added, it was "not clear" that "better methods would have produced significantly different results."
This "investigation" and its outcome more than anything else shows that the "research" into climate change is a politically driven agenda and not science as I know her. The 1,073 emails are just icing on the cake. The real Earth Shattering Ka-Boom is found in the over 200 Megabytes of source code and data that accompanied the package that was leaked by the still unknown whistle-blower. A perfect excerpt would be this comment from the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file. Harry was hired by the Climatic Research Unit from 2006 through 2009 and this file is his daily logbook. He was hired to help clean up the code.
So, to station counts. These will have to mirror section 3 above. Coverage of secondary parameters is particularly difficult - what is the best approach? To include synthetic coverage, when it's only at 2.5-degree?

No. I'm going to back my previous decision - all station count files reflect actualy obs for that parameter only. So for secondaries, you get actual obs of that parameter (ie naff all for FRS). You get the info about synthetics that enables you to use the relevant primary counts if you want to. Of course, I'm going to have to provide a combined TMP and DTR station count to satisfy VAP & FRS users. The problem is that the synthetics are incorporated at 2.5-degrees, NO IDEA why, so saying they affect particular 0.5-degree cells is harder than it should be. So we'll just gloss over that entirely ;0)

ARGH. Just went back to check on synthetic production. Apparently - I have no memory of this at all - we're not doing observed rain days! It's all synthetic from 1990 onwards. So I'm going to need conditionals in the update program to handle that. And separate gridding before 1989. And what TF happens to station counts?

OH FUCK THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I'm hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found.
Even as a non-programmer, looking through the code and the data I can see that this is egregiously shoddy work at best and a willful contamination and forcing of data at the worst. Like I said, the very fact that this "investigation" found nothing wrong proves that it is politics and not Science. Posted by DaveH at April 15, 2010 11:03 AM | TrackBack
Comments

The text is full of jargon and acronyms, but the translation is: "It's getting harder and harder to corrupt the data so as to prove global warming, but we will keep trying!"

Posted by: geran at April 16, 2010 7:31 AM
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