Top Secret NOFORN Restricted Access Climate Model Results

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

Y’know, some of these climate games are getting kind of boring. I’m tired of people who are paid with my taxes hiding their data, results, and findings. Case in point, the “Community Earth System Model” of the University Center for Atmospheric Research (UCAR).  They describe their model as:

The Community Earth System Model (CESM) is a fully-coupled, global climate model that provides state-of-the-art computer simulations of the Earth’s past, present, and future climate states.

Figure 1. The forcings and major flows in the CACM1.0 model. Source

OK, fine. This new CESM model is the successor to the CCSM3.0 climate model. People always tout the fact that the CESM code is open source, so you can investigate their results. I wanted to find out more about the CCSM3.0 model, in particular the forcings used in the AR4 simulations of the 20th century. What could go wrong?

Well, the first thing to go wrong is that you have to register to read their data. I don’t like that, but I can live with it. But then I find out that I can’t just register—I need to be approved by the good folks at UCAR to even view their holy climate results, we wouldn’t want just anyone reading them I guess …

About 95% of the UCAR funding comes from my taxes, and I need their approval to see their results??? C’mon, fools, this is not secret Al-Qaeda documents or the floor plan to Fort Knox, it’s just your stupid model results. Why are you making it hard to access?

Having no option, I applied to get access to the repository where they store the sacred results and forcings of the model runs. I figured OK, I can play their games. So I applied for the lowest level of access, read-only.

But this being climate science, today it got worse, viz:

• From: XXX <XXX@cgd.ucar.edu>
• Subject: Your request for access to the CESM repository was declined.
• Date: May 6, 2011 12:49:13 PM PDT
• Your request for access to the CESM repository was declined.You still have access to all public releases of CESM. Go to http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/models/ for access to the public model releases.
• Title:
• First Name: Willis
• Middle initial:
• Last name: Eschenbach
• Account name: XXX
• My position: climate researcher
• Primary working group: Climate Change and Assessment
• Relevant working groups: Atmosphere Model:Climate Variability:
• Type of access: Level-1: Read-only
• Summary of work: Analyzing the relationship of forcing to output of cesm models
• List of CESM collaborators: None
• Start date: Now
• End date: 2 years after starting
• Submission date: 5/6/2011
• Acceptance status: Declined
• Password issued: no
• Remarks on status: please use released cesm1 code base

Oooooh, that angrified my blood mightily, and I waxed wroth. I am ashamed to say that I generally disturbed the peace of the neighborhood with my voluble speculations on the species and personal habits of their ancestors, and with my loud suggestions that the good folks of UCAR should perform anatomically improbable forms of sexual auto-congress …

And Judith Curry and other people wonder why the public doesn’t trust climate scientists, and why their message is so widely disbelieved? In general, the public rightly assumes that people who hide something … have something to hide. Bozo logic, I know, but strangely, people believe it.

I can’t tell you how tired I am of this petty, provincial, and anti-scientific ‘you have to say the secret password before I’ll show you my results’ point of view. I have linked to this post in my response to the charming UCAR fellow … we’ll see how it plays out. Yeah, I know I should have written to them to straighten it out before posting, and if this were my first rodeo I would have done that. At this point, I’ve been stuffed around by this kind of nonsense too many times, I’m tired of being Mr. Nice Guy.

And more to the point, there is absolutely no reason for them to restrict access in the first place. It is non-secret, non-sensitive public data paid for by public money, and the public should have full and unfettered access to read it any time, without preconditions.

w.

[UPDATED May 7, ’11] If anyone else would like to join in the hunt, what I am looking for are the numbers underlying the graphics shown on this page. Month-by-month global values for the forcing variables. I’d prefer if they were in GISS style, where all of the forcings are expressed in W/m2, but raw concentrations (e.g. ppmv) are fine too.

[UPDATED May 8, ’11] Well, the powers that be have decided to let me in, and I’ve found what I need. My thanks to Steven Mosher and Derecho64 for the assistance. I’ll post up the results in Excel form once I convert them (the ozone data alone is almost 2 GBytes).