Monday, November 30, 2009

Harry Read Me - ClimateGate

An entertaining read. Harry has grave qualms about the data, the methods, and his own abilities, all written up in the ReadMe text file in unflinching fashion.

A lovely quote:

So, once again I don't understand statistics. Quel surprise, given that I haven't had any training in stats in my entire life, unless you count A-level maths.


An honest man in a den of vipers - I've just finished Wolf Hall, and the similarity between the climate crew and the post-Luther Catholic church is striking.

Climate crew:
- suspect data,
- data munges up the wazoo,
- academic echo chamber,
- currently facing funding cuts and fraud scrutiny,
- lashing out at critics (how Dare they - they aren't even Peer-Reviewed!).

Catholic Church:
- failing belief in the basic propositions by population,
- emergence of fanatical fringes of existing belief system,
- closed system of ecclesiastical courts (a state within a state)
- facing funding cuts as Henry VIII realises that if he can be Head of the Church and thus secure a ruling on his first 'marriage', he can also obtain the keys to the church's extensive coffers,
- burns critics at the stake after trials conducted by....priests!

I know analogies by example aren't scientific, but hey, it worked for carbon dioxide and AGW, d'innit?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here's a lovely one:

"OH !@*& THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I'm hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found."

Anonymous said...

And another: this one may be innocent but it leaves questions on how data can be manually manipulated. It's not the only line on that subject, just has the most curious language.

"Gotta love the system! Like this is ever going to be a blind bit of use. Modified the code to
leave such stations unmolested, but identified in a separate file so they can be 'cleansed', it
being a little too risky to auto-cleanse such things."

Fr. J. said...

Besides the fact that you are relying on bad history (read The Stripping of the Altars, if you want to really understand 16th Century English history) I completely agree. The climatologists have been acting more like Stalinists than scientists. Now, there's an historical reference for you!

BTW, here's a link: http://www.amazon.com/Stripping-Altars-Traditional-Religion-1400-1580/dp/0300060769

Anonymous said...

Nice dispatch and this enter helped me alot in my college assignement. Thank you as your information.

Anonymous said...

Easily I agree but I think the brief should secure more info then it has.