| 27 November 2009
Leaked emails out of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia have prompted a wave of criticism of the scientists who most vociferously have staked the claims that the planet is warming, that humans are responsible for that warming and that drastic, immediate action must be taken, like, you know, now, if the planet is to be saved. I've always been of the mindset that we lack the perspective to understand what this warming actually represented.
Was it as the supporters of anthropogenic global warming asserted the result of carbon emissions, or was it merely the cycle of heating and cooling common to our earth? How could we know? What reservoir of knowledge could we tap to successfully understand the variables involved and program them into models that produced graphs and charts and models that accurately foretold a world without ice caps and without Manhattan.
The Wall Street Journal chimes in with an op-ed today that charges that the game was rigged from the get go and that the leaked data illustrate that point.
According to this privileged group, only those whose work has been published in select scientific journals, after having gone through the "peer-review" process, can be relied on to critique the science. And sure enough, any challenges that critics have lobbed at climatologists from outside this clique are routinely dismissed and disparaged.
This past September, Mr. Mann told a New York Times reporter in one of the leaked emails that: "Those such as [Stephen] McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted." Mr. McIntyre is a retired Canadian businessman who fact-checks the findings of climate scientists and often publishes the mistakes he finds—including some in Mr. Mann's work—on his Web site, Climateaudit.org. He holds the rare distinction of having forced Mr. Mann to publish a correction to one of his more-famous papers.
As anonymous reviewers of choice for certain journals, Mr. Mann & Co. had considerable power to enforce the consensus, but it was not absolute, as they discovered in 2003. Mr. Mann noted to several colleagues in an email from March 2003, when the journal "Climate Research" published a paper not to Mr. Mann's liking, that "This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the 'peer-reviewed literature'. Obviously, they found a solution to that—take over a journal!"
But pressure is not at the heart of the efforts to shape the opinions of a public that is less than up to date on the workings of modern scientific research. The central function of the CRU was to build models that predicted the scope of the looming disaster. And from the looks of it, Borat and Bruno debugged their code. Declan McCullagh of CBS doesn't go that far, but judge for yourself the reasonableness of my assertion:
As the leaked messages, and especially the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, found their way around technical circles, two things happened: first, programmers unaffiliated with East Anglia started taking a close look at the quality of the CRU's code, and second, they began to feel sympathetic for anyone who had to spend three years (including working weekends) trying to make sense of code that appeared to be undocumented and buggy, while representing the core of CRU's climate model.
One programmer highlighted the error of relying on computer code that, if it generates an error message, continues as if nothing untoward ever occurred. Another debugged the code by pointing out why the output of a calculation that should always generate a positive number was incorrectly generating a negative one. A third concluded: "I feel for this guy. He's obviously spent years trying to get data from undocumented and completely messy sources."
Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU's Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" and "APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION." Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: "Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend - so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!"
Those models provided worst case scenarios that noted disaster-loving filmmaker Roland Emmerich used to base some of the horrors audiences watched in "The Day After Tomorrow"
I've argued as long as I've been alive that there are at least three things for which human beings will always have an incomplete understanding because we do not have an adequate basis for comparison. The first is the human mind. We can examine its physical characteristics. We can experiment to reveal how it reacts to chemicals. We can probe the thoughts that reside within by communicating with an individual. But an individual, by his or her very nature, possesses a lifetime of unique experiences that shape and mold how the mind behaves. Ergo, the data collected are relevant to that unique mind. While commonalities may exist among all our minds, conclusions from those physical characteristics do not adequately allow an understanding of how we think and feel and why we behave the way we do.
Second on the list is our universe. In that it is the whole enchilada, there is nothing else that we are aware of to base a comparison. The final entrant is our planet. Though unlike the mind and the universe, I am hopeful our understanding of other worlds may someday allow us to better understand the one on which we all live. However, that day will not come in my lifetime, nor likely the lives of my immediate descendants.
The earth's uniqueness as a habitable world, its proper mix of sustainable air, drinkable water, makes comparison to other planets we can study, but cannot inhabit, a flawed process. Would the earth react the same as Venus, whose rotation is far longer, and in the opposite direction of our own world, to a build up of heat retaining gases in the upper atmosphere? How do we know with certainty? We don't. In my not so humble opinion.
The scientists at places like East Anglia and Penn State and countless other research centers, posited that their computer models could explain how the world would react. And now we discover that models were based on code that was messy, inadequately documented and bug-laden. The data generated from such models could not be relied on for much of anything. Except probably a disaster movie. Nahhh, too unbelievable.
UPDATE: Movie trailer now in English
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