Well, not the CRU itself, but the person or persons who hacked and leaked the documents. The comments from the programmer ‘Harry’ are particularly revealing.
Back to the gridding. I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation – apparently linear as well.
As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless.
It also means that we cannot say exactly how the gridded data is arrived at from a statistical perspective – since we’re using an off-the-shelf product that isn’t documented sufficiently to say that.
Why this wasn’t coded up in Fortran I don’t know – time pressures perhaps? Was too much effort expended on homogenisation, that there wasn’t enough time to write a gridding procedure? Of course, it’s too late for me to fix it too. Meh.0
More excerpts from Harry are here. Garden variety lying, petty glee over the pain of critics, and budgetary flim-flam are not unexpected (the budgetary flim-flam should be prosecuted if true), but to find that there is no well-documented data set, and that the models used to work on it are also undocumented and error-riddled – that is just way beyond my previous level of cynicism for the Anthropogenic Global Warming enterprise.
At this point, it seems like the CRU needs to either show the world a reasonable, reviewable dataset – or we all go back to the drawing board with respect to paleoclimatology and its implications for Anthropogenic Global Warming.
Why should the hacker be nominated for a Peace Prize? Think of all the economic waste that would result if we treated AGW as an immanent threat based on cooked data. All of the money that could have been used on beneficial things, innovations, businesses, roads, airports, harbors, hospitals would have been wasted. All the downward pressure on emerging economies to not follow the same tracks to meet their energy needs as we have done. This person or group would be to fraud- and waste-prevention what Norman Borlag was to agriculture.
Of course, the CRU hasn’t given a full response and I’m hoping for something that indicates they are not really frauds, thugs, and liars. And I’m also assuming that if this turns out to be an accurate representation of how the CRU lied, obfuscated, and threatened, then policy makers will hold off on making large scale decisions until a better understanding of climate is gained.
So, several hurdles to be cleared before the Nobel nomination for the hackers. And we tend not to reward people who prevent us from doing stupid things, they’re the true targets of “no good deed goes unpunished.”
