Revenge of the Nerds: Climategate Is Following the Memogate Pattern
ENTERPRISE BLOG
By Jay Richards on Energy and Environment
Accompanying the infamous Climate Research Unit (CRU) emails leaked last Thursday night, there are all sorts of documents, including detailed coding notes from programmers. These notes reveal the attitudes of programmers who had grappled with the data and computer programs supposedly establishing drastic warming patterns in the twentieth century. These program code segments are, if anything, more revealing than the emails.
Since these documents are more technical than the emails, however, analysis has been slower in coming. And, as in the case of the emails, there's unmistakable evidence of fudging and book-cooking, all designed to give the impression that the warming in the twentieth century is unprecedented. The evidence is all the more damning because of the expletive-laced complaints of programmers tasked with altering code to corral unruly, unreliable, and sometimes cherry-picked data in a pre-determined direction. At one point, a poor, exasperated programmer, "Harry," bemoans "the hopeless state of our databases." (See telling examples and good analysis of these code notes here, here, here, and here.)
Hiding and manipulating data and code are especially serious in climate science because, as Willis Eschenbach has pointed out, "unlike all other physical sciences, [climate science] does not study things—instead it studies averages . . . This is because climate by definition is the average of weather over a suitably long period of time (typically taken as a minimum of 30 years)." So without the background information, it's almost impossible for other scientists to verify—or falsify—your results.
Of course, most of the big broadcast media are still in full blackout mode on this story, choosing instead to report on breaking news about Pete the orphaned moose. They're following the pattern of the Dan Rather Memogate controversy in 2004. With that history-making story, the legacy media mostly tried to ignore the story, and then, when it got too big, began to spin it. Rather and CBS issued increasingly bizarre denials. Even though the gig was up within a couple of days, they continued to defend the document in question, and the stories based on it, for two excruciating weeks. (Compare CRU's Phil Jones offering similarly risible explanations.) Meanwhile, in the parallel universe called reality, unknown and often apolitical bloggers with specialized expertise in font styles, IBM Executive Series and Selectric typewriters, military protocol, and word-processing software dismantled the details for any curious person with an Internet connection. Other, politically oriented blogs consolidated, analyzed, and broadcast the findings.
MemoGate gave many of us our first taste of the swarm-intelligence of the blogosphere, and showed that it cab beat the legacy media for getting to the bottom of a story via a networked, open-source form of peer review, with a highly refined division of labor.
We may just now be seeing the potential for this new way of transferring and analyzing information. In Memogate, remember, we were talking about a single one-page Word document. With Climategate, we're dealing with thousands of detailed, often technical documents. They may even have been compiled internally at the CRU in response to a Freedom of Information request and were then leaked instead. So the revenge of the nerds could be especially brutal and prolonged. Already, insights and analyses are proliferating on the climate blogosphere so quickly that it's becoming impossible for even the best consolidators to keep up. |
