Climategate
We start with a file called “HARRY_READ_ME.txt.” This is a file containing notes of someone’s three-year effort to try to turn a pile of existing code and data into something useful. Who is Harry, you ask? Clearly, a skilled programmer with some expertise in data reduction, statistics, and climate science. Beyond that I won’t go. I’ve seen sites attributing this file to an identifiable person, but I don’t have any corroboration, and frankly the person who wrote these years of notes has suffered enough.
Poor Harry is in the first circle of programmer hell: the program runs fine; the output is wrong.
This was a pretty entertaining article about some more of the leaked climate change data and emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the U.K.
If you haven't heard about this here are a couple of climate change friendly links, Guardian and Times Online what is interesting is that don't even address the code and data that was also included with the emails. Just the emails as they are easily defended and can be written off as just the usual banter between dedicated scientists bent on getting their incredibly important message out and saving the world. While the critics are the evil fossil fuel companies, bent on killing the earth while seeking their evil profits.
What is really interesting is that this news isn't being reported heavily in the large publications. Doing news search on this brings up surprisingly few hits. Most of those deal with the importance of the unknown hackers instead of the possibility that the data used heavily in proving that man caused global climate change is a real and present danger could be corrupted. In fact it could be so screwed that the climate scientists themselves can't reproduce their own results.
Also not mentioned is the possibility that it wasn't evil hackers that released the emails and code but someone on the inside acting a whistle blower. Personal information has deleted from some of the emails and that doesn't really seem like something that hackers would take the time to do.
Just to balance things out here are some more links with information about this.
Posted Wednesday 01:11 PM