Climategate Computer Codes Are the Real Story
ClimateGate Computer Codes Are the Real Story, By Charlie Martin, Nov 24, 2009
Extracts:
So far, most of the Climategate attention has been on the emails in the data dump of November 19 (see here, here, and here), but the emails are only about 5 percent of the total. What does examining the other 95 percent tell us?
Here’s the short answer: it tells us that something went very wrong in the data management at the Climatic Research Unit.
We start with a file called “HARRY_READ_ME.txt.” This is a file containing notes of someone’s three-year effort to try to turn a pile of existing code and data into something useful. Who is Harry, you ask? Clearly, a skilled programmer with some expertise in data reduction, statistics, and climate science. Beyond that I won’t go. I’ve seen sites attributing this file to an identifiable person, but I don’t have any corroboration, and frankly the person who wrote these years of notes has suffered enough.
The story the file tells is of a programmer who started off with a collection of code and data — and the need to be able to replicate some results. The first entry:
1. Two main filesystems relevant to the work:
/cru/dpe1a/f014
/cru/tyn1/f014
Both systems copied in their entirety to /cru/cruts/
Nearly 11,000 files! And about a dozen assorted “read me” files addressing individual issues, the most useful being:
fromdpe1a/data/stnmon/doc/oldmethod/f90_READ_ME.txt
fromdpe1a/code/linux/cruts/_READ_ME.txt
fromdpe1a/code/idl/pro/README_GRIDDING.txt
(yes, they all have different name formats, and yes, one does begin ‘_’!)
Believe it or not, this tells us quite a bit. “Harry” is starting off with two large collections of data on a UNIX or UNIX-like system (forward slashes, the word “filesystem”) and only knows very generally what the data might be. He has copied it from where it was to a new location and started to work on it. Almost immediately, he notices a problem:
6. Temporarily abandoned 5., getting closer but there’s always another problem to be evaded. Instead, will try using rawtogrim.f90 to convert straight to GRIM. This will include non-land cells but for comparison purposes that shouldn’t be a big problem … [edit] noo, that’s not gonna work either, it asks for a “template grim filepath,” no idea what it wants (as usual) and a serach for files with “grim” or “template” in them does not bear useful fruit. As per usual. Giving up on this approach altogether.
——
The file peters out, no conclusions. I hope they find this poor guy, and he didn’t hang himself in his rooms or something, because this file is a summary of three years of trying to get this data working. Unsuccessfully.
I think there’s a good reason the CRU didn’t want to give their data to people trying to replicate their work.
It’s in such a mess that they can’t replicate their own results.
This is not, sadly, all that unusual. Simply put, scientists aren’t software engineers. They don’t keep their code in nice packages and they tend to use whatever language they’re comfortable with. Even if they were taught to keep good research notes in the past, it’s not unusual for things to get sloppy later. But put this in the context of what else we know from the CRU data dump:
1. They didn’t want to release their data or code, and they particularly weren’t interested in releasing any intermediate steps that would help someone else
2. They clearly have some history of massaging the data — hell, practically water-boarding the data — to get it to fit their other results. Results they can no longer even replicate on their own systems.
3. They had successfully managed to restrict peer review to what we might call the “RealClimate clique” — the small group of true believers they knew could be trusted to say the right things.
As a result, it looks like they found themselves trapped. They had the big research organizations, the big grants — and when they found themselves challenged, they discovered they’d built their conclusions on fine beach sand.
But the tide was coming in. [emphasis ours]
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