Climategate: The Smoking Code

I’m coming to you today as a scientist and engineer with an agnostic stand on global warming.

If you don’t know anything about “Climategate” (does anyone else hate that name?) Go ahead and read up on it before you check out this post, I’ll wait.

Back? Let’s get started.

First, let’s get this out of the way: Emails prove nothing. Sure, you can look like an unethical asshole who may have committed a felony using government funded money; but all email is, is talk, and talk is cheap.

Now, here is some actual proof that the CRU was deliberately tampering with their data. Unfortunately, for readability’s sake, this code was written in Interactive Data Language (IDL) and is a pain to go through.

NOTE: This is an actual snippet of code from the CRU contained in the source file: briffa_Sep98_d.pro

[sourcecode language=”text”]

;

; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!

;

yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]

valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75   ; fudge factor

if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’

yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)

[/sourcecode]

Mouse over the upper right for source code viewing options – including pop-up window

What does this Mean? A review of the code line-by-line

Starting off Easy

Lines 1-3 are comments

Line 4

yrloc is a 20 element array containing:

1400 and 19 years between 1904 and 1994 in increments of 5 years…

yrloc = [1400, 1904, 1909, 1914, 1919, 1924, 1929, … , 1964, 1969, 1974, 1979, 1984, 1989, 1994]

findgen() creates a floating-point array of the specified dimension. Each element of the array is set to the value of its one-dimensional subscript

F = indgen(6) ;F[0] is 0.0, F[1] is 1.0….. F[6] is 6.0

Pretty straightforward, right?

Line 5

valadj, or, the “fudge factor” array as some arrogant programmer likes to call it is the foundation for the manipulated temperature readings. It contains twenty values of seemingly random numbers. We’ll get back to this later.

Line 6

Just a check to make sure that yrloc and valadj have the same number of attributes in them. This is important for line 8.

Line 8

This is where the magic happens. Remember that array we have of valid temperature readings? And, remember that random array of numbers we have from line two? Well, in line 4, those two arrays are interpolated together.

The interpol() function will take each element in both arrays and “guess” at the points in between them to create a smoothing effect on the data. This technique is often used when dealing with natural data points, just not quite in this manner.

The main thing to realize here, is, that the interpol() function will cause the valid temperature readings (yrloc) to skew towards the valadj values.

What the heck does all of this mean?

Well, I’m glad you asked. First, let’s plot the values in the valadj array.

Look familiar? This closely resembles the infamous hockey stick graph that Michael Mann came up with about a decade ago. By the way, did I mention Michael Mann is one of the “scientists” (and I use that word loosely) caught up in this scandal?

Here is Mann’s graph from 1999

As you can see, (potentially) valid temperature station readings were taken and skewed to fabricate the results the “scientists” at the CRU wanted to believe, not what actually occurred.

Where do we go from here?

It’s not as cut-and-try as one might think. First and foremost, this doesn’t necessarily prove anything about global warming as science. It just shows that all of the data that was the chief result of most of the environmental legislation created over the last decade was a farce.

This means that all of those billions of dollars we spent as a global community to combat global warming may have been for nothing.

If news station anchors and politicians were trained as engineers, they would be able to find real proof and not just speculate about the meaning of emails that only made it appear as if something illegal happened.

Conclusion

I tried to write this post in a manner that transcends politics. I really haven’t taken much of an interest in the whole global warming debate and don’t really have a strong opinion on the matter. However, being part of the Science Community (I have a degree in Physics) and having done scientific research myself makes me very worried when arrogant jerks who call themselves “scientists” work outside of ethics and ignore the truth to fit their pre-conceived notions of the world. That is not science, that is religion with math equations.

What do you think?

Now that you have the facts, you can come to your own conclusion!

Be sure to leave me a comment, it gets lonely in here sometimes.

hat tip to WUWT commenter “Disquisitive”

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NOTE: While there are some interesting points raised here, it is important to note a couple of caveats. First, the adjustment shown above is applied to the tree ring proxy data (proxy for temperature) not the actual instrumental temperature data. Second, we don’t know the use context of this code. It may be a test procedure of some sort, it may be something that was tried and then discarded, or it may be part of final production output. We simply don’t know. This is why a complete disclosure and open accounting is needed, so that the process can be fully traced and debugged. Hopefully, one of the official investigations will bring the complete collection of code out so that this can be fully examined in the complete context. – Anthony