The CRU hack really made me stop and think about my views on global warming, in particular this article at The Register was interesting to me as a programmer because it points to some analysis of the data which is a pretty damning read. Specifically this analysis of the “Harry Readme file” is very fierce in its criticism — and rightly so, it looks like the source code and comments that we got to see were pretty awful.
But I think it helps to take a step back: We have no idea who the hackers were, but consider the possible range of their political motives. If they were lefties, it’s fair to say they wouldn’t have done it. It’s possible that they had no political motive but just wanted to get “the truth” out there. But it seems much more likely to me — especially given the timing just before Copenhagen and the impact they must have known it would have, that the hackers were climate-change deniers intent on causing as much disruption to the public impression of scientific consensus as possible. And it worked — it made me question what I had hitherto considered to be scientific fact.
Indeed their political motives seem to be reflected in the code and text the hackers chose to expose. Since they hacked the CRU’s fileserver, they would have had access to enormous amounts of data and code. And they managed to find some pretty nasty stuff in there. The problem is, any large project has a fair amount of bad code and confusing documentation, often not currently used but stored away in case bits of it might be useful later. So we almost certainly didn’t get a balanced view of the work that the CRU do, we just saw the darkest corners of their fileservers. If it is the current status quo, then the CRU has a big apology to make, and some serious data management and software engineering to learn, fast. But one must be very careful in making assumptions based on incomplete information.
So here’s an idea: why don’t the CRU balance out the bad code by releasing all their code, warts and all, under an open-source license? Then we’d know whether the source code that we got to see was indicative of a real problem — also we’d get to see whether the bad code released is still being used for modern climate modeling, or whether it’s been superseded by something of higher quality.
It helps to balance the arguments from the likes of The Register with this editorial from Nature. Coming from an academic background at Oxford University, it’s fair to say that in my experience academics are truth-seekers, and peer-reviewed journals are still the best way we’ve got to be rigorous about our science.
