Those of us who have looked at GISS and CRU code have been saying this for months. Now John Graham-Cumming has posted a statement with the UK Parliament about the quality and veracity of CRU code that has been posted, saying “they have not released everything”.
I found this line most interesting:
“I have never been a climate change skeptic and until the release of emails from UEA/CRU I had paid little attention to the science surrounding it.”
Here is his statement as can be seen at:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc5502.htm
=================================
Memorandum submitted by John Graham-Cumming (CRU 55)
I am writing at this late juncture regarding this matter because I have now seen that two separate pieces of written evidence to your committee mention me (without using my name) and I feel it is appropriate to provide you with some further information. I am a professional computer programmer who started programming almost 30 years ago. I have a BA in Mathematics and Computation from Oxford University and a DPhil in Computer Security also from Oxford. My entire career has been spent in computer software in the UK, US and France.
I am also a frequent blogger on science topics (my blog was recently named by The Times as one of its top 30 science blogs). Shortly after the release of emails from UEA/CRU I looked at them out of curiosity and found that there was a large amount of software along with the messages. Looking at the software itself I was surprised to see that it was of poor quality. This resulted in my appearance on BBC Newsnight criticizing the quality of the UEA/CRU code in early December 2009 (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8395514.stm).
That appearance and subsequent errors I have found in both the data provided by the Met Office and the code used to process that data are referenced in two submissions. I had not previously planned to submit anything to your committee, as I felt that I had nothing relevant to say, but the two submissions which reference me warrant some clarification directly from me, the source.
I have never been a climate change skeptic and until the release of emails from UEA/CRU I had paid little attention to the science surrounding it.
In the written submission by Professor Hans von Storch and Dr. Myles R. Allen there are three paragraphs that concern me:
“3.1 An allegation aired on BBC’s “Newsnight” that software used in the production of this dataset was unreliable. It emerged on investigation that the neither of the two pieces of software produced in support of this allegation was anything to do with the HadCRUT instrumental temperature record. Newsnight have declined to answer the question of whether they were aware of this at the time their allegations were made.
3.2 A problem identified by an amateur computer analyst with estimates of average climate (not climate trends) affecting less than 1% of the HadCRUT data, mostly in Australasia, and some station identifiers being incorrect. These, it appears, were genuine issues with some of the input data (not analysis software) of HadCRUT which have been acknowledged by the Met Office and corrected. They do not affect trends estimated from the data, and hence have no bearing on conclusions regarding the detection and attribution of external influence on climate.
4. It is possible, of course, that further scrutiny will reveal more serious problems, but given the intensity of the scrutiny to date, we do not think this is particularly likely. The close correspondence between the HadCRUT data and the other two internationally recognised surface temperature datasets suggests that key conclusions, such as the unequivocal warming over the past century, are not sensitive to the analysis procedure.”
I am the ‘computer analyst’ mentioned in 3.2 who found the errors mentioned. I am also the person mentioned in 3.1 who looked at the code on Newsnight.
In paragraph 4 the authors write “It is possible, of course, that further scrutiny will reveal more serious problems, but given the intensity of the scrutiny to date, we do not think this is particularly likely.” This has turned out to be incorrect. On February 7, 2010 I emailed the Met Office to tell them that I believed that I had found a wide ranging problem in the data (and by extension the code used to generate the data) concerning error estimates surrounding the global warming trend. On February 24, 2010 the Met Office confirmed via their press office to Newsnight that I had found a genuine problem with the generation of ‘station errors’ (part of the global warming error estimate).
In the written submission by Sir Edward Acton there are two paragraphs that concern the things I have looked at:
“3.4.7 CRU has been accused of the effective, if not deliberate, falsification of findings through deployment of “substandard” computer programs and documentation. But the criticized computer programs were not used to produce CRUTEM3 data, nor were they written for third-party users. They were written for/by researchers who understand their limitations and who inspect intermediate results to identify and solve errors.
3.4.8 The different computer program used to produce the CRUTEM3 dataset has now been released by the MOHC with the support of CRU.”
My points:
1. Although the code I criticized on Newsnight was not the CRUTEM3 code the fact that the other code written at CRU was of low standard is relevant. My point on Newsnight was that it appeared that the organization writing the code did not adhere to standards one might find in professional software engineering. The code had easily identified bugs, no visible test mechanism, was not apparently under version control and was poorly documented. It would not be surprising to find that other code written at the same organization was of similar quality. And given that I subsequently found a bug in the actual CRUTEM3 code only reinforces my opinion.
2. I would urge the committee to look into whether statement 3.4.8 is accurate. The Met Office has released code for calculating CRUTEM3 but they have not released everything (for example, they have not released the code for ‘station errors’ in which I identified a wide-ranging bug, or the code for generating the error range based on the station coverage), and when they released the code they did not indicate that it was the program normally used for CRUTEM3 (as implied by 3.4.8) but stated “[the code] takes the station data files and makes gridded fields in the same way as used in CRUTEM3.” Whether
3.4.8 is accurate or not probably rests on the interpretation of “in the same way as”. My reading is that this implies that the released code is not the actual code used for CRUTEM3. It would be worrying to discover that 3.4.8 is inaccurate, but I believe it should be clarified.
I rest at your disposition for further information, or to appear personally if necessary.
John Graham-Cumming
March 2010
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PS: If you (Mike) similarly think that there’s only a 5% chance that 2014 won’t be among the five warmest years ever — and surely a cap-and-trade warmist would agree that the odds of that happening are remote, given the long-term uptrend and the recent hiatus in that trend that ought to be “made up” — then another bargain is available, because 10% odds are being offered on that proposition as well. (I.e., there’s a Sell offer at 90.)
I am reminded of that old saw..
“People who live in glass houses should not throw stones”
Seems that Professor Hans von Storch, Dr. Myles R. Allen et al still have a lot to learn. Humility would be a good start.
@Jeff: Yes, that picture is a bit old. The one on The Guardian web site is very recent: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/03/amateur-role-science-arts
I run a very small property services company. There are only a few tens of thousands of dollars at stake with each transaction yet there is no way my public liability insurer would stand for me writing code myself to handle management of transactions, nor me doing my own property valuations and not using an independent licensed valuer despite the fact that I have 20 years experience in processing these transactions and assessing valuation documents. I would be sued to bankruptcy. Yet with trillions of public and private money at stake these so called UEA academics and their supporters think it entirely appropriate they should bodge up there own code and statistical methods and that criticism from professional programming engineers and statisticians is out of order. These guys are truly out of there minds.
BTW Someone on this thread suggested creating an open source version of the code for CRUTEM3/HadCRUT3. I already did that when I originally looked at the data the Met Office had released.
In fact, I did it before the Met Office released their own code.
It’s available from SourceForge: http://landsurfacetemp.sourceforge.net/
anna v (21:28:50) Well-said.
Mike: re your conviction that CO2 is causing global warming, there are at least two places you can put your money to make a fortune on Global Warming. These are stock index funds GWO, and PBW. You might be interested to know, however, that the price for each has taken a serious tumble in the past two years – far more than the S&P 500 index. It would appear that the profit-seeking investors of the world have missed a big opportunity, leaving it wide open for you. Good luck with that.
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/is-global-warming-good-investment.html
I’ve examined the code for a bunch of NOAA models. It was uniformly shabby and contained a number of obvious deficiencies peculiar to handling floating point math with digital computers. No methodical rounding control to contain generational error creep, no provision for detection/warning of loss of precision, etc. It appeared to have been written by someone with very limited knowledge of computational math techniques.
Doing loosey goosey floating point math when huge error margins of 20-50% are intentionally designed in (ex. structural engineering) and small errors don’t matter is one thing. Doing it when tiny fractions are divined to mean something significant is quite another.
CodeTech (20:30:44) wrote: “You [Mike] figure “not much harm done”? [By C&T] Well, the evidence in Europe and even from this recession say otherwise… that we would literally shut down our first world economies. Not just a slowdown, and not some magical, fairyland of “green jobs and energy”. Not even close. Economic suicide is an understatement. Unlike the 1929 depression, a HUGE percentage of the first world now directly have their savings and investments in the markets, markets that will crash, fail, tumble, tank, and end. It won’t just be stock brokers jumping out of windows.”
Now who is being alarmist? C&T or a carbon tax that started low (or a high cap), which is what I’ve seen advocated, would do little to the economy. If then the majority of climatologists are right, we can rise the tax or lower the cap to limit the damage caused by climate change. It time C&T or a CT would cause some economic drag but nothing like what you are saying. Read the CBO report.
http://www.eenews.net/public/25/11455/features/documents/2009/06/22/document_daily_01.pdf
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/91xx/doc9134/04-24-Cap_Trade_Testimony.1.1.shtml
While there is no free lunch your alarmism has no basis in known economic principles.
anna v (21:02:35) wrote: “This [My statement regarding C&T] is a very naive statement. You are saying : take civilization back to 19th century levels , and not much harm will be done!!, if the pyramid scheme worked of course in reducing the alleged culprit, CO2. ”
More economic alarmism. I can’t even make sense out of your sentence.
anna v (21:02:35) wrote: “Already millions starved to death in the Third World with the ethanol fiasco, because the price of corn went artificially up. In Haiti they were eating mud pies before the quake because of this. And you have the hubris to say not much harm will be done. I guess as you and yours survive the pyramid.”
Millions did not starve. There were food shortages that some attributed to the shift toward ethanol production. And I agree, pushing ethanol is not backed by the science but by corporate and political interests. Further research may change this. But, we do need to watch where the money is coming from. There is influence peddling all around. But, the big bucks are from the oil and coal companies that have funded a lot of the conservative think tanks that push denial and do nothingism. The “green” corporate interests are far weaker.
Environmental alarmists do exist in the media, but not so much among the actual climate scientists. But be just as weary of the economic alarmists.
As a climate modeler I am not surprised that the code did not adhere to professional coding standards and didn’t have “error checks” or “was poorly documented”. The problem of course is that the CRU data were processed by climate scientists who know how to code but are not professional programs that have to adhere to strict coding standards. Oftentimes modelers write brute code in order to process data. Not surprising this programmer did not like what he saw in a climate scientist’s code.
I am not defending poor practice but just saying this isn’t as uncommon in the climate community as you think.
rbateman (08:45:48) : Now I have to wonder if there is software at USHCN or GHCN that stomps over real data and punches artificial holes in it where no holes should be.… I’d like to get with you, E.M.Smith, if you are about. I have some very interesting anomalies in the data that you’d be good at figuring out the pattern to.
Well, I’m “about”. Though frankly, with the volume of postings here lately, I can’t follow all the comments in all the threads. I’m “skipping around” more than usual. So it would be better to talk over on chiefio.wordpress.com or in my email (encoded in words in the “about” tab over there…)
And yes, I’ve noticed a few holes that didn’t make sense too. The most blatant is Bolivia where they have had CLIMAT reports at least since 2007 and I’ve found other Met Depts with the Bolivia records, yet GHCN does not have them…
Gregg E: Ref Ariane 5 failure report is here: http://sunnyday.mit.edu/accidents/Ariane5accidentreport.html
DRA/DERA Malvern were involved and were part of UK MoDs software and safety assessment group. I was part of that organisation until it split to QinetiQ and DSTL and which still supplies software system assessment, audit etc of very complex systems. The ISA roles. So the UK Gov (OGD) has and always had access to independent assessment on most any technical topic..trouble is OGD in particular hardly ever used it. Hence the mass of IT/Software system calamities we have seen over the years relating to Gov Procurement. It looks as if its all happening again, only this time at the Planet level! I have always considered AGW a likely lame duck simply because of the lack of published project control information..never mind the data.
@ur momisugly Mike (14:26:24) :
Others have pointed out most of the many flaws, but I think you demand a proper fisking
1. Not true. And a bit of a straw man. The entire basis of the AGW demand for world shaping policy changes is statistical analysis of adjusted data using computer software. If the people doing this cannot show their work, it is a major problem. This is not like a reproducible chemistry experiment. And while I would not use actually getting to the moon as the primary test case for NASA software, it does sort of validate. Which is why some have said wait 30 years (or another 15 years or whatever) to have a reasonable period for identifying the validity of the models.
2. Using the same compromised ADJUSTED data, with the same selection bias and most importantly the same adjustments which are what actually introduce the warming.
3. The data analysis is based on adjusting actual historical temperatures, interpolating multiple stations in specific ways to establish grids (which may or may not be defensible depending on the details).
The last two points illustrate nothing about robustness. They illustrate a real problem with basing different analyses on the same adjusted data and a potential problem with
The hockey stick is most certainly NOT “a data set of past temps”. It is an amalgamation of multiple different unrelated proxies (Ice cores, tree rings etc) stitched together in sequence, plus some of the same adjusted temperature records referenced above, minus some inconvenient proxy data data (tree rings from 1960 to 1990) that does not agree with their pre-conceptions or their models, and ought to undermine their “calibration” of the proxies (rather than “hide the decline”).
This is a flawed analogy. The equivalent would be if those scientists had thrown out the orignal data and not documented their adjustments but demanded that we take it on faith. Or if they re-ran an analysis of some early medical work showing the link between tobacco and cancer and adjusted the data to show that fewer people actually died, or that people who died had died of other causes, or that some of them were not actually dead (just sleeping very soundly), or were not actually people, and then concluded that tobacco had no link to cancer deaths.
And then demanded legislation that everyone had to subsidize smokers, or that all workplaces had to allow chainsmoking at your desk.
That would be foolish indeed
This is would only be irrelevant, except it also carries the implication of this bizarre shibboleth of the AGW crowd that the only reason one would question their pronouncements is being funded by the deep pockets of the big commercial interests. Just stupid.
The cap and trade system is what we should be concerned about as what the big business interests actually want. From Enron to Goldman Sachs, these derivative markets have been promoted by the same scum who have done more to subtract value, transfer wealth to the rich and game the entire system
This could be a valid scenario. Or it could be completely off point. Or if in the early 1990s someone with chronic ulcers went to nine doctors in a row who all trotted out the conventional wisdom that was accepted but not questioned within the profession and so they all prescribed the same dietary and pharmacological prophylaxis or treatment. Which did not work. Then he went to a tenth doctor who said “We don’t really have foundation for these protocols but they clearly have not worked for you. However some Australians think that a plurality, perhaps a majority of chronic ulcers are caused by H pylori infection, so let’s try some antibiotics which while unproven for this use case have well known and limited potential negatives”
Removing the adjustments from the actual data and/or questioning the validity or robustness of some of the proxies used makes the warming go away. The models could be directly opposite of reality.
And a simplistic reading of the physics or focus on CO2 mitigation as the sole policy amelioration underestimates the potential effect of other greenhouse gases.
It is entirely possible, maybe even likely that human activities have caused/will cause climate changes. Some of these changes might be warming. Some of this might be from CO2. But for the love of God, can we acknowledge that these are not logical dominoes that lead to one conclusion.
Undocumented assertions from liars who appear to be lacking expertise in statistics, physics, geology, computer science, meteorology or any discipline necessary to actually execute on the promise of this pretend discipline of “climate science” is no reason to introduce panicky changes that may not do anything useful, but will cause economic hardship while transferring wealth to the same derivative traders who made such a great accomplishment of credit default swaps, securitized junk mortgage pools and then took trillions in public funds as dessert.
So forgive anyone who asks” Ummmm… can you show us your work?”