Flying Pigs at NASA!

This has turned out to be quite a week of flying pigs! NASA/GISS has released the source code for their global temperature data aggregation – something that many climatologists and many anthropogenic global warming skeptics have been demanding for years. Jim Hansen, the GISS chief scientist (don't even think about getting between him and a liberal reporter), noted the release in a particularly grumpy ungracious email – he really does act more like royalty than he does a scientist…

I found two good posts about this release: one on Climate Skeptic (a new blog dedicated to anthropogenic global warming skepticism, written by the same guy who writes CoyoteBlog), and one on Steve McIntyre's excellent Climate Audit site. Steve is the ‘amateur’ climatologist who's been asking tough questions for the past couple of years – and getting mostly incoherent anger from the likes of Jim Hansen as a result. To me, Steve is the epitome of a professional scientist. Jim (how dare you question me!) Hansen, on the other hand, dishonors his profession on a regular basis by displaying exactly those attitudes and behaviors that are supposed to be avoided by scientists: opacity (e.g., the secret data “adjustment” methodologies), intolerance of debate, and a reliance on faith instead of reproducible experiments and verifiable facts.

The just-released data and programs are available at this link on NASA's site. I took a quick look through them; nothing exhaustive. It's a mish-mash of Python, Fortran, C, and shell scripts; from this software engineer's perspective it looks like something cobbled together by a convention of drunken chimps. My starting assumption, were I to review this in detail, would be that it is badly broken. The challenge would be to prove that assumption wrong, and my guess is that it would be a daunting challenge. I'll let someone else tackle that one!