Sure you should reserve judgement. It’s not like you know anything about this do you? You’re only an ex-scientist who can read the emails. Yes, wait for a civil servant to tell you what to think. Now I understand.

After all, it’s not like they didn’t try to do any of the stuff that has been mentioned in the emails. Yeah, all scientists manipulate data, delete emails, rig referee reports, refuse to provide data all the time! You probably did it too when you were a scientist. Or maybe you didn’t. Come on ! Admit it, these guys behaved badly.

As for me, I do not TRUST this bunch of scientists any more. I am no longer inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. I feel conned. I used to believe in the AGW hypothesis. Now I am not so sure.

Seems to me you would prefer to trust them. I prefer to see the numbers and check them.

Given the number of politically-motivated FOI requests that climate scientists have had to put up with over many years, I can sympathise with their frustration at denialists’ attempts to obstruct the practice of climate science. I reserve judgement on the question of whether any of the CRU people did naughty stuff, and am happy to leave it to investigators to decide on such matters, including the police looking for those who hacked the Norwich server. I’m sure that a peek at certain denialists’ email archives and server logs would throw up some interesting information, but I’m not personally motivated to do this.

As for code quality, I’ve worked in academia, and also within an ISO9001-certified software engineering environment where I was tasked with validating spacecraft flight dynamics software. Spotting potentially costly mistakes, in other words. Taxpayers’ money too!

In an otherwise balanced report for Newsnight, the BBC’s Susan Watts dropped the ball when she got an industrial software engineer to comment on some IDL code snippets from the CRU. Maybe this guy did find a bug, but all software, including ISO-certified stuff, will contain residual errors. The question is whether they have a significant impact on the program outputs. Scientists do let their peers check code, you know, and problems are flagged up in this way, as happened in this case.

Code written by individuals or groups of university-based researchers should not be expected to conform to the same standards as programs produced in industrial or scientific civil service institutions. Code often migrates from academic research labs to the real world, and is modified and documented as appropriate. But when you are doing cutting edge science within close-knit groups, you do not waste time ensuring that your constantly updated software routines conform to bureaucratic standards that are themselves far from failsafe.

These are not the actions of good scientists. The scientists I worked with would never have countenanced such behaviour. Maybe my area was an exception and this is normal for science. If so, I am shocked and saddened about the state of science.

The Bishop Hill link provided gives a good summary with the emails linked.

Also, I expect that there may be some more surprises once people start looking at the data and the code that was released. The HARRY_READ_ME file was quite an eye opener about the integrity of the code and the irreproducibility of the numbers. As someone who has worked in industry after academia, the quality of the code and systems seems very amateurish. It’s not at all clear how the source code was controlled, how versioning was done etc… And these guys get millions of dollars in funding!

Every focus group which has ever been asked about ‘yah-boo-sucks’ debate has said they hate it, that it makes them want to wish a plague on the houses of both sides of the argument.

I go back to my point about the ‘paradoxical response’. It’s time to stop shouting louder and instead modify the message and its direction.

“Move along ,move along, nothing to see here” is simply not going to cut it as a response. The game has changed completely and the supporters of AGW are running to catch up.

If you had read more of the emails then you might understand why what Morano was saying made Watson lose his cool and by doing so make things even worse for CRU, if that is possible.

There is a good summary of some of them here:

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/20/climate-cuttings-33.html

It is by no means complete.

Must I?

I disagree that there is an obligation on me to read the hacked correspondence, but as it happens I have now read some of the messages. And I really don’t see what all the fuss is about. The Nature editorial this week pretty much sums it up.