8
Dec
Dec
East Anglia Climatic Research Unit’s climate analysis programming code a sloppy mess
A British programmer by the name of John Graham-Cumming explains how the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) had problems with its sloppy, undocumented computer programming analyzing climate change data, with trillions of dollars on the line.
Discusss: here
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How fortunate that NASA:s code is good, according to this expert. Since NASA:s temperature curve differs little from that of CRU.
It would be more interesting to see the evidence showing that CRU:s code is actually manipulating data to make temperatures look warmer. If the code is available, it would be a very easy thing to investigate this matter.
I’m trying not to jump to conclusions here but I grew up with NASA during the 70′s and I know we had a lot of smart people like my father working their programs. He worked at a tracking station that studied among other things, sun activity; spots, solar flares. To this day he still swears the man cannot destroy the environment. I agree that we make an area uninhabitable, but the over-all ecosystem, like air temperatures and ice caps have more to do with the solar activity, the Earth’s rotation and axis. So I know that NASA was collecting this type of data well into the early 70′s. We should really ask for this raw data from NASA and have it evaluated again or by a third party.
To me it seems like there could be some sort of agenda with government funding. If the data is so well researched and peered, why are there so many questions about the data used in the research and reports; and now the lack of raw data. It’s the duty of our elected government to provide all the data available and an unbiased opinion/interpretation and suggest a coarse of action. I remember hearing these smart scientists at the height of the NASA program who believed the Earth is fluctuating with the cycles of the sun, solar axis, polar shifts and such. If we want to prove them wrong then we need research that done as professional and accountable as “in the early days”. Let’s stop the arguing and get the real data out.
Mike,
I do agree with you that the data should be freely available and the methods well-documented and transparent. To which extent they are not, I do not know, but I’m sure improvements can be made.
Regarding the sun, it is widely acknowledged by climate scientists that differences is solar cycles and solar activity is what explains climate changes in the past (although they assume that CO2 played a role even back then). It is actually the case that until the 1970s solar variations explained temperature shifts quite well, at the time when you say that your father did research at NASA. But since then the solar activity has been low and fairly stable, nevertheless we have seen a strong rise in temperature and CO2 since 1970.
The short of it is that before 1970, solar variations explained temperature better than CO2 did, today CO2 explains temperature well but the current solar variations does not. That is the simple reason why today’s climate scientists talk more about CO2 than about solar variations.
So far no one has been able to correctly model the temperature trend between 1970 and present without inclusion of CO2 in the model. It behooves on the AGW-skeptics to come up with a factor that explains the last decade’s temperature trend better than CO2 does.
Solar activity, when combined with cosmic ray incidence evidently improves the correlation with recorded temperature. (This originally proposed – I think – by Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark.) His theory was also the topic for a group of physicists at a CERN Colloquium held within the last couple of years. Both Svensmark and the CERN physicist indicated that cooling, and not warming was now likely, with the duration of cooling perhaps several decades.
It seems apparent that no theory is going to do better than provide a general indication of the type of forthcoming climate to expect, probably on a much broader time scale but otherwise not unlike our general notions about what to expect during each of our four seasons. There will be variation within the predicted ‘season’ just as there is within our four seasons. However, since our revolution about the milky way takes something like 250 million years, and during just the past million years we’ve experienced about 7 ice ages there isn’t a lot of detailed historical data to work with.
The real problem is to figure out how to hang around long enough to see whether this theory works out!
Actually I do not know where you get the information that CO2 explain the worlds temperatures better than the sun. I haven’t seen it.