Even worse, having reviewed the code that leaked during Climategate, it's pretty clear that the researchers are not competent programmers. The revelation that

Even worse, having reviewed the code that leaked during Climategate, it's pretty clear that the researchers are not competent programmers. The revelation that was most off putting was the "commented out" code that injected arbitrary values that was "just used for testing". Testing is great, but it has no place in the production code. If the researchers method of testing is to write test code in the production code, run it once to make sure things "work", then comment it out, we certainly shouldn't be making any decisions based on predictions made by that code. Their testing framework is apparently comments in the code. For a project I'm currently working on, I have a 5:1 test to code ratio, largely because I'll be processing credit cards. While my project will probably only ever deal with a few hundred thousand dollars in transactions, I need to be sure that those transactions will be properly handled. In comparison, these researchers are encouraging a trillion dollar piece of legislation, and their testing methodology is intuition and spaghetti code. Further troubling is the assertion that this is science. As far as I can tell it isn't testable or repeatable. As I recall, that's a pretty big part of what science is.