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Having read through some of that leaked code, I can safely say that if they are as bad at climate science as they are at programming, we have nothing to fear.

by jcnnghm 17y ago

Having read through some of that leaked code, I can safely say that if they are as bad at climate science as they are at programming, we have nothing to fear. In particular, the assertions that some have made that the "artificial correction for decline" code is commented out, and was only used for testing, is troubling. Test code intertwined with the production code is a recipe for disaster. And doesn't the phrase Climate Denialism have kind of a religious bent? If Climate Change Skeptics are deniers, then Climate Change Proponents are Global Warming Alarmists. Is there really a need to cloud things with name calling. And really, are people actually skeptical that the climate is changing, or are they skeptical that's it's changing so severely and destructively that we need to put a trillion dollars on hot. Hasn't the climate always changed? Wasn't their a 1,000 foot deep, 20,000 sq m lake in Utah, and a land bridge between North America and Western Europe? Is this the one right temperature? By what measure?

baguasquirrel 17y ago
It's sad, yes, but my friends in the non-CS research sciences could tell you that that code is actually pretty good compared to theirs. Think for loops that iterate over one element hardcoded arrays. Yea. That bad.
- patio11 17y ago
  Having done some research work in CS I'm not inclined to cast too many stones at the poor climate scientists just for having outrageously bad code. I was on a project with $N million in funding that had no source control, a concept I was totally ignorant of the time. We had one of our profs attempt to edit the sole copy of the code, running in production, during a customer demo. This is a "Physician, heal thyself" for the academic branch of our discipline.
yannis 17y ago
Just for those interested emails and code were on wikileaks which is now unavailable. You can download from http://www.eastangliaemails.com/ http://www.eastangliaemails.com/

by jcnnghm 17y ago

baguasquirrel 17y ago

It's sad, yes, but my friends in the non-CS research sciences could tell you that that code is actually pretty good compared to theirs. Think for loops that iterate over one element hardcoded arrays. Yea. That bad.

patio11 17y ago
Having done some research work in CS I'm not inclined to cast too many stones at the poor climate scientists just for having outrageously bad code. I was on a project with $N million in funding that had no source control, a concept I was totally ignorant of the time. We had one of our profs attempt to edit the sole copy of the code, running in production, during a customer demo. This is a "Physician, heal thyself" for the academic branch of our discipline.

yannis 17y ago

Just for those interested emails and code were on wikileaks which is now unavailable. You can download from http://www.eastangliaemails.com/ http://www.eastangliaemails.com/