Jeff Burns's Public Library

These emails certainly make juicy reading, and they make some people look really, really bad. Arrogance, not unknown in the scientific community, seems to look worse in email than over the phone.

But apart from the gossip, the question is whether the integrity of CRU’s climate science is called into question and whether the actions that are being inferred from the emails impacted the process of that science. Here are 4 things that I am aware of that was possible to check:

1) Did the email writers succeed in barring papers from discussion in IPCC? The intention to prevent two papers from being included in the IPCC 4AR seemed to be clearly stated in the emails. Those papers have been identified and, guess what, they are clearly discussed in chapter 3 of Working Group 1 (p 244). So in spite of the bravado of the emailers, the openness of the IPCC process won out.

2) Trenberth expressed horror at his inability to track the energy fluxes in the first decade of this century. His email was quite graphic and people thought it was the smoking gun - a climate scientist admitting SECRETLY to his confidants that he did not know where the energy went! Certainly this secret admission dooms the science. Or not, as it turns out. Trenberth did not try to keep the secret. He, in fact, wrote a very public paper (2009) in which he not only said that the fate of the energy was unknown, he put numbers on it. And he said that it was a big limitation on his ability to predict the future impact of emissions. So the secret was a secret only to those who get their news from stolen emails; it was not a secret to those who actually read the literature.

3) Certainly the Argggghs of harry_read_this prove that something terrible is wrong with the climate data. Actually not again. All kinds of commenters have noted that harry’s comments were insufficient to permit the outsider to judge that the code does what it says and in fact leaves the reader with the impression that the programmer did not know exactly what it was supposed to do. But this code was ripped out of context. we do not know what harry’s notebooks said, for example. So to judge harry’s final product by his comments is crazy. If harry had known that his code was going to be stolen and put on display, he would have commented it more carefully and made sure that the flow charts would please the professors of computer science. But if he and his colleagues had documented the efforts and validation well enough for lab use, then, well, no harm, no foul. I am quite sure that they validated the code, but failed to put the documentation somewhere where it would be stolen with the source.

4) But don’t all the fudges in Harry-read_this prove that the data are massaged beyond recognition? Unfortunately you can not even conclude that. The data that these people are painstakingly assembling were not intended for use in climate science aiming to achieve 0.1C accuracy. They were operational weather observations. So when the time that the data was acquired shifted, then a correction was needed. Or if the location shifted, something would change. If a data set shows a sudden jump, the some comparisons with trusted benchmarks could lead to a correction. It is quite likely that the corrections were not recorded for archival purposes in the code. So in fact, it is quite possible that one learns nothing from reading stolen code. The real test is not whether the code meets the standard to the experts who get it without the context, the real test is whether the data set is replicated by other investigators who are trying to do the same thing. Say NASA GISS or NOAA NCDC. And, surprise of surprises, it is. We are told that NASA GISS does a fine job of sharing its raw data and documenting its processing steps. So instead of stealing code from unsuspecting workers in the field, why don’t the validaters go over to NASA’s web site and down load and analyze the GISS data? Maybe that would not be as much fun. Actually, I read that that had been done and NASA was forced to make a correction of 0.003 C by an alert outsider. Good on him!

Of course, on the blogs this can be spun however they want and the talk shows will bloviate without stop. But we know that that world is unconnected with reality.

Even Dr. Lindzen says in his 2007 Energy and Environment paper that climate is warming and humans are contributing. So if the deniers expect to prove otherwise with these emails, they have a steep climb.

Regards,

Chuck Wilson

Golden, CO