George Monbiot Excerpt: I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, they say, are a storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition. It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can't possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging. The response of the greens and most of the scientists I know is profoundly ironic, as we spend so much of our time confronting other people's denial. Pretending that this isn't a real crisis isn't going to make it go away. Nor is an attempt to justify the emails with technicalities. We'll be able to get past this only by grasping reality, apologising where appropriate and demonstrating that it cannot happen again. [...]
climatedepot.com
I have sympathy for Monbiot. He has shown himself an honest man, much to my surprise. He really believed in AGW. He trusted the science. He is shaken to see the scientists behave like political conspirators. Monbiot has the air of a 1950s Communist confronted with Stalin's crimes: badly shaken but still clinging to his faith in the Party Line.
The next few months will be hard on him. Though I am not a climate scientist, I was a software engineer and database designer for many years, and the state of the code that "Harry" had to deal with was quite shocking. Scientists have a name for flinging code about and not bothering to write proper software (writing the program is only 10% of the job of writing a robust software package), but Harry struggled for months and finally gave up on simply trying to reproduce previously published results. At any well run lab this should have been a matter of pulling archived materials out of storage and following instructions. Either Harry is a dweeb or he inherited a colossal mess. My money is on the latter.
But Harry found few instructions and missing data, and finally gave up and decided to use the already published data up to 1995, and recalculate the database values only post 1995. Gee, you think the methodology might have changed? Considering the number of bugs Harry reported fixing, some of them basic errors which should have been caught earlier had the programming been competent, the metholodology must have changed. With what scientific basis? None whatsoever. With what transparency? None. Plus, the code is full of "tricks" that handle different years differently w/o explanation - use proxies before 1960, switch to observed data after 1960, and so on. No wonder the CRU refused to make their data public. How could any other scientist reproduce their results when their own programmer couldn't do it?
All of the data must be reviewed and recalculated from the raw data sources - this time with transparency and open peer review.
At this point I no longer know if there even was any global warming in the 20th century. I can't imagine what the climate scientists are going through. We will see their conclusions as time passes. |
