Saturday, December 12, 2009

the harry read me file

Many will have heard about Climategate.  Some will have heard the dismissals that the leaked emails and files are not important to the larger narrative of human induced climate change, which has now supplanted the previous narrative of human induced global warming.


One of the key reasons the leak matters is that it provides a window not only on the conduct of many of the leading scientists in creating the narrative, it goes straight to the claims of scientific robustness and accuracy of the data upon which the claims of crisis are based.


Here is a summation of the Harry Read Me file. It reveals the extent to which the very base data for climate modeling and policy development is presumptive rather than definitive.  That's a polite way to say more fiction than fact.

An example:
  • getting seriously fed up with the state of the Australian data. so many new stations have been introduced, so many false references.. so many changes that aren’t documented. Every time a cloud forms I’m presented with a bewildering selection of similar-sounding sites, some with references, some with WMO codes, and some with both. And if I look up the station metadata with one of the local references, chances are the WMO code will be wrong (another station will have it) and the lat/lon will be wrong too.
  • I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that’s the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight.


Now I have no problem with the fact that the data are incomplete, complex and contradictory.  I would expect that, especially since climate itself is a complex, dynamic system about which we really know very little.  My objection is the warmist, alarmist insistence on proclamations of data certainty and the necessity for immediate policy actions that are counter-intuitive to the uncertainties and gaps in our knowledge.  

It is the deceit and the assertion of ideological dogma in the name of science that offends me:

  • The Party wants the Earth to be warming, so that its members can establish their power over every aspect of our lives. The Earth has not warmed in a decade, in fact it has gotten colder. But the Party says warmer, and further, says that the warming is due to human addition of CO2 to the atmosphere.


Come clean, and admit the whole narrative is a political artifice and stop trying to hide behind a sheen of science and claims to a superior environmental morality.