CRU Source Code Explained

h/t
Wolf Howling, who is back to posting after an extended hiatus. The Wolf is back with a vengeance, some sharp analysis and many excellent links at his site.

Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping

Reverend Billy's website

'Botch after botch after botch'

A random sampling of internal memos from the world's leading climate research agency:

"But what are all those monthly files? DON'T KNOW, UNDOCUMENTED. Wherever I look, there are data files, no info about what they are other than their names. And that's useless ..." (Page 17)

- "It's botch after botch after botch." (18)

- "The biggest immediate problem was the loss of an hour's edits to the program, when the network died ... no explanation from anyone, I hope it's not a return to last year's troubles ... This surely is the worst project I've ever attempted. Eeeek." (31)

- "Oh, GOD, if I could start this project again and actually argue the case for junking the inherited program suite." (37)

- "... this should all have been rewritten from scratch a year ago!" (45)

- "Am I the first person to attempt to get the CRU databases in working order?!!" (47)

- "As far as I can see, this renders the (weather) station counts totally meaningless." (57)

- "COBAR AIRPORT AWS (data from an Australian weather station) cannot start in 1962, it didn't open until 1993!" (71)

- "What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah -- there is no 'supposed,' I can make it up. So I have : - )" (98)

- "You can't imagine what this has cost me -- to actually allow the operator to assign false WMO (World Meteorological Organization) codes!! But what else is there in such situations? Especially when dealing with a 'Master' database of dubious provenance ..." (98)

- "So with a somewhat cynical shrug, I added the nuclear option -- to match every WMO possible, and turn the rest into new stations ... In other words what CRU usually do. It will allow bad databases to pass unnoticed, and good databases to become bad ..." (98-9)

- "OH F--- THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done, I'm hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases." (241).

- "This whole project is SUCH A MESS ..." (266)

And based on stuff like this, politicians are going to blow up our economy and lower our standard of living to "fix" the climate?

Are they insane?

Lorrie Goldstein
via
Lindy Bill

The original raw temperature data has been dumped - what academic tosses out source material?? They didn't factor in the Medieval Warming Period, they hardcoded the hockey stick.....and we're just scratching the surface. Meanwhile, Obama, Browner, and Holdren are happily oblivious as they lurch toward Copenhagen....pray to God he doesn't actually sign anything.

"Climategate is a destroyer of world-views"

This may be the best post to date on Climategate, every point is hit and every dot connected. The Anchoress is in top form, every word is gold.

>>There is a lot to read about Climategate, but none of it is in the Mainstream Media, with the exception of the Obama-Administration described "not real news" organization. That would be Fox News, which is covering the story.

The New York Times, in a stunning bit of hypocrisy, says they won't report on Climategate because they didn't like the way the information was discovered. To the NY TImes, the real story, if they ever deign to cover it, will be about the method in which the story was found, and the ends not justifying means.

There is a valid nit to pick over hacking and how it threatens not just programs but governments and individuals. But when an entire global movement, with accompanying financial interests and public bullying has been founded on "science" that is -at the very least- now confirmed to be "unsettled," that information, regardless of how it was brought to light, needs to be reported on and investigated.

The NY Times' prim distaste for the means of disclosure on this issue rather reminds me of a few years back, when someone leaded a memo from the Senate Intelligence Committee, whereby Sen. Jay Rockefeller suggested strategies to undermine "Bush's war," and the mainstream media ignored the content of the memo, while waxing indignant over the leak.

The standard media, it seems, only like leaks when they serve their own agendas, or take down their perceived enemies, foreign and domestic.

So, they don't like this Climategate Story, not at all. Troubling links and trouble, trouble for the narrative.

Let me tell you why the press is blacking out the Climategate story:

In a nutshell, Climategate is a destroyer of world-views. As someone who has always maintained that the AGW hype was a matter of politicians and grifters seizing an opportunity to use unsettled science as a means of getting filthy rich while imposing harsh measures against human freedom, I am very familiar with the world-view of the alarmists. Whenever I wrote about the "hoo-hah" of AGW (and particularly of Al Gore's stupendous, international fake-out and hypocrisy), my email would load up with people telling me I was "a stupid hick," unschooled in scientific method (just like Al Gore) and therefore unentitled to opine on anything, so I should just "shut up" and "go away" and of course, I was a "nazi." These emails occasionally ended with a diatribe against George W. Bush for good measure, and suggested he and I were both "criminals" against humanity. One person even accused me of being Barbara Bush, in disguise.

All of that was standard-issue hate, but nowhere as amusing as the occasional "Sinner, fry in hell" emails I will get from a Jack Chicker, so I stopped reading them long ago.

But I also had a journalist I admired, and who I still consider a friend, privately and gently suggest that if I doubted the truth about AGW then I was as deluded (and perhaps as evil) as a "holocaust denier."

Yes. The left went that far. The press went that far. They embraced this unsettled science, this unproven theory, with a fervor of moral righteousness; to dispute AGW was to be a bad and stupid person, even if were a dissenting scientist.

To question the point of "environmentally sound" lightbulbs that give bad light and create a dangerous and toxic risk when they break was to "not get the point," which was that the planet was "dying" thanks to Hanukkah candles and incandescent lightbulbs.

To suggest that large-numbers of privileged people flying scores of private planes to exotic locals, gorging themselves on fine fare while deciding how the common folk ought to live, in order to "save" the planet from AGW was bizarre, wasteful and hypocritical in an era of video-conferencing, was to be sniffed at as "insipid." Didn't one understand the power of the Gore Indulgence carbon-offset? Just pay some money to the man with the absolute moral authority on all things green, and your sins are covered. Somewhere, a tree is planted.

The scam of AGW was permitted to gain the foothold it did, because of George W. Bush.

It's Bush's fault: if Bush had not fought back when CBS News called Florida for Al Gore before polls in the panhandle had closed, if Bush had not taken Gore's selective re-count to the Supreme Court, if Bush had just taken those hanging chads like a man and allowed Al Gore to ascend to the presidency (as he'd been groomed to do before he sighed and fumed his way through debates, put his common sense into a lockbox and stumbled into the Buddhist convent, discovering the existence of "no controlling legal authority,") whether the Vice-President actually won or not (the NY Times eventually admitted "not") then Al Gore would not have had to seek redemption and his fortune in climate hucksterism, and the left would not have had to over-indulge him in it, overcompensating in order to "kick Bush in the leg."

That's basically it. The AGW/Climate Change question became a rigorous boondoggle that got out of control not because the scientist who first suggested a connection between human carbon emission and a change in climate were bad people, or that the question was not worth asking, but because bad people then took the uncertain hypothesis, put it on media-fueled steroids, demonized anyone who disagreed with them, made it political -so much so that even the scientists got caught up in the good/bad, smart/stupid, Gore/Bush, Left/Right identifiers- and found real power there; they allowed the AGW movement to become the dubious centering pole upholding the giant circus tent of their worldviews.

As such, it is not permitted to be shaken. Shake the centering pole, and everything could come tumbling down: Oh. My. Gawd! If the Gore-doubters were right about this, what else might they be right about? And if they're all stupid, and I'm smart, but they're right and I'm wrong . . .

Implosion.

If the true-believers of AGW got this wrong, and they'd attached it to all of their politics, all of their hate, all of their superiority, then everything is in a free-fall.

And this is why the mainstream media cannot possibly report on Climategate until they have an acceptable counter-narrative that they can haul out in order to either debunk the story or soften its edges, even as they break the news.

The press, who spent a huge portion of their credibility convincing America that President Bush was a "liar" and a "power-abuser" and an "arrogant chump who made the world (read Chirac and Schroeder) hate us" and then spent the balance of their capital carrying into office a man whose every utterance comes with an expiration date, who seems to have very quickly abused his power and has treated our traditional allies (who were partnering well with the United States from 2004-on) with contempt or disinterest. The press really cannot afford to admit that almost nothing they have said in the past 9 years has escaped ideological or political framing to suit their agenda. Implode, they will.

So the story must not be told, until it can be told from their self-protective angle which is undoubtedly under development as you read this.

[...]

There is an anvil-heavy irony to all of this. Part of the smart/stupid, left/right narrative was built on the fantastic strawman that the AGW-doubters on the right were "enemies of science," that first they were not allowing science to use human embryos for experimentation, and now they were daring to doubt the most imperative scientific advice in the history of mankind.

But if the excesses of the weather-sciences are about be discredited to the degree that -as some worry- may "bring all science into dispute", then that harm comes not from the right, who simply dared to question, but solely from the left, who refused to permit questions, openness, transparency.

Well, let's get to the bottom of all of this, and then let us try -if it is possible, any longer- to become a saner world, say I.

Let Al Gore keep his ill-gotten booty and his stupid Academy Award and his worthless Nobel Peace Prize, and let him go away, somewhere, to an abode that is at least as "green" as President Bush's despised ranch in Texas.

Let people once more get on a commercial air flight without being pestered about how they are guilty of earth-murder.

Let's name the grifters, disassemble the dubious global policies that have been hovering for landing in Copenhagen, admit that the greatest threat to the world and its people is predicated on bombs and hate rather than some feckless, unprovable idea, and then let's prepare for the cold, cold winter with some good old-fashioned oil-drilling while we finally begin to debate a nuclear future.

In truth, I just want my incandescent lightbulbs back, please.

h/t
Lindy Bill

The Grinch Who Moved Thanksgiving

Always a pleasure to get a history lesson from Bill Kauffman. A couple of snippets:

It seems that in 1939 Thanksgiving was to fall on November 30th, a matter of consternation to the big merchants of the National Retail Dry Goods Association (NRDGA). The presidents of Gimbel Brothers, Lord & Taylor, and other unsentimental vendors petitioned President Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving to the previous Thursday, November 23, thus creating an additional week of Christmas shopping—and to the astonishment of those Americans without dollar signs in their eyes, the President did so. (Not all merchants favored the shift. One Kokomo shopkeeper hung a sign in his window reading, “Do your shopping now. Who knows, tomorrow may be Christmas.”)

Opinion polls revealed that more than 60 percent of Americans opposed the Rooseveltian ukase; dissent was especially vigorous in New England. The selectmen of Plymouth, Massachusetts informed the President, “It is a religious holiday and [you] have no right to change it for commercial reasons.” Thanksgiving is a day to give thanks to the Almighty, harrumphed Governor Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts, “and not for the inauguration of Christmas shopping.”

[...]

Twenty-three states celebrated Thanksgiving 1939 on November 23, and another 23 stood fast with November 30. Two states, Colorado and Texas, shrugged their shoulders and celebrated both days—Texas did so to avoid having to move the Texas-Texas A&M football game.

Bill's article is at Front Porch Republic

A jig

Uncle Earl

Jones, Briffa and Mann seem to have committed several criminal offences

These include:

1. Misappropriation of public funds

They deliberately falsified data then used the results of the falsification to obtain additional research funding. This is criminal fraud under English Law.

2. Deliberate attempt to prevent disclosure of information that was requested under the FOI Act

They colluded to destroy information that was the subject of an FOI request. This is a criminal offence under English Law.

These two offences will do for starters, but there are others, too. Indeed, both of the above offences can be doubled by charging the alleged miscreants with conspiracy in each case. Jones, Briffa and Mann should be prosecuted as a warning to others who would pervert science as a method to promote a political agenda. However, there is little probability that the Crown Prosecution Service will charge the alleged miscreants. It is more likely that they will be awarded Knighthoods.

And those like Monbiot who colluded in all of this will say, “We did not know”.

more at Joanne Nova's excellent blog
h/t
Brumar89

The World According to Americans

from Paul Kedrosky
via
KLP

Blasted blogger, shrinking things down. For a better view, go here.

An incredible bird

NYTimes: We Won't Publish "Statements that Were Never Intended for the Public Eye."

The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won't be posted here.

hahahahahaha.....please stop...have they forgotten the PENTAGON PAPERS??!!

Monckton on Climategate: ‘They Are Criminals’

The man who challenged Al Gore to a debate is furious about the content of the leaked CRU emails — and says why you should be, too.

This is what they did — these climate “scientists” on whose unsupported word the world’s classe politique proposes to set up an unelected global government this December in Copenhagen, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all formerly free markets, to tax wealthy nations and all of their financial transactions, to regulate the economic and environmental affairs of all nations, and to confiscate and extinguish all patent and intellectual property rights.

The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be — tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of emails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world’s four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years — and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years.

Worse, these arrogant fraudsters — for fraudsters are what we now know them to be — have refused, for years and years and years, to reveal their data and their computer program listings. Now we know why: As a revealing 15,000-line document from the computer division at the Climate Research Unit shows, the programs and data are a hopeless, tangled mess. In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up. Unfortunately, the British researchers have been acting closely in league with their U.S. counterparts who compile the other terrestrial temperature dataset — the GISS/NCDC dataset. That dataset too contains numerous biases intended artificially to inflate the natural warming of the 20th century.
more
h/t
Nadine Carroll

The Great Global Warming Swindle

h/t
TideGlider

Death certificate is imprinted on the Shroud of Turin, says Vatican scholar

A Vatican scholar claims to have deciphered the "death certificate" imprinted on the Shroud of Turin.
h/t
Jungle Trader

To say this is surreal does not begin to describe....

Where does Althouse find this stuff? May help explain the genesis of the global warming scaremongering....did it all begin with Tiny Tim? Those poor children...the humanity!

"A gear has slipped in the planet."

Whited Sepulchre: Sometimes you wake up in the morning and everything has changed. A gear has slipped in the planet. This is going to be a big, big deal.

The Evidence of Climate Fraud

A folder containing documents, data and emails purportedly "hacked" from Britain's Climate Research Unit (CRU) may be smoking gun proof of a worldwide conspiracy to exaggerate the existence, causation and threat of global warming. And the list of apparent conspirators includes many of the world's leading climate alarmists -- the very scientists on whose work the entire anthropogenic global warming theory is based.

In a Friday interview with Investigative Magazine's TGIF edition, CRU director Phillip Jones confirmed [PDF] that the incriminating documents, which have been widely disseminated online, are in fact genuine. Accordingly, whether indeed the labor of hackers, or instead that of a CRU whistleblower, the contents of the FOI2009 folder are now public record -- and that's nothing short of dynamite.
h/t
KLP

Warmist hoax exposed

"...the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory - a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below - emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down sceptics."

This is clearly not the work of some hacker, but of an insider who’s now blown the whistle.
h/t
DMA

Much more at Climate Depot

'Unfriend' Beats Out 'Birther,' 'Death Panel,' 'Tramp Stamp' For Oxford Word Of The Year

The new word of the year
h/t
Althouse

Bach - Concerto for 2 pianos BWV 1060

1. Allegro

2. Adagio 3. Allegro

Sunday morning Bach cantata

Funeral of Joe Cahill

Freedom! The fall of the Wall

Large Hadron Collider 'Being Sabotaged from the Future'

Scientists claim the giant atom-smashing Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is being jinxed from the future to save the world.

In a bizarre sci-fi theory, Danish physicist Dr Holger Bech Nielsen and Dr Masao Ninomiya from Japan claim nature is trying to prevent the LHC from finding the elusive Higgs boson. Called the "God particle," the theoretical boson could explain the origins of mass in the universe — if physicists can find the darn thing.

The scientists say their math proves nature will "ripple backward through time" to stop the LHC before it can create the God particle, like a time traveller who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

“One could even almost say that we have a model for God,” Dr Nielsen says in an unpublished essay. “He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

"While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus," Dannis Overbye wrote in the New York Times.

"In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus."

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr Nielsen told the New York Times.

h/t
longnshort

Baguette Dropped From Bird's Beak Shuts Down The Large Hadron Collider

A bird dropping a piece of bread has shut down the whole operation.


The Baguette Incident: Re-enacted according to eyewitness accounts

h/t
Lindy Bill

Planned Parenthood Leader Resigns After Watching Ultrasound of Abortion Procedure

“I just thought I can’t do this anymore, and it was just like a flash that hit me and I thought that’s it.”

Soldier's Angels Project Valour

IT Fundraiser, running through November 11 to raise money for technology that reconnects wounded warriors and supports their recovery.

Provides voice-activated laptops and other adaptive technology to severly injured military personnel. Please consider donating to this great cause.

"It was the first time I felt whole since I’d woken up wounded in Landstuhl."
–Major Charles "Chuck" Ziegenfuss, on using a voice-controlled laptop

National Education Association Website Promotes Saul Alinsky’s Books For Teachers

Nice Deb has the skinny.

El Día de los Muertos

HAPPY HALLOWEEN

Ron Paul tells Bloomberg that Congressman Watt has just more or less killed the bill to audit the fed:

Representative Ron Paul, the Texas Republican who has called for an end to the Federal Reserve, said legislation he introduced to audit monetary policy has been “gutted” while moving toward a possible vote in the Democratic-controlled House.

The bill, with 308 co-sponsors, has been stripped of provisions that would remove Fed exemptions from audits of transactions with foreign central banks, monetary policy deliberations, transactions made under the direction of the Federal Open Market Committee and communications between the Board, the reserve banks and staff, Paul said today.

“There’s nothing left, it’s been gutted,” he said in a telephone interview. “This is not a partisan issue. People all over the country want to know what the Fed is up to, and this legislation was supposed to help them do that.”..

Paul, a member of the House Financial Services Committee, said Mel Watt, a Democrat from North Carolina, has eliminated “just about everything” while preparing the legislation for formal consideration. Watt is chairman of the panel’s domestic monetary policy and technology subcommittee.

h/t
alanrs