His name is Ian “Harry” Harris, and he’s a research staffer involved with dendroclimatology, climate scenario development, data manipulation and visualisation, programming at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. The CRU is one of the leading institutes in the world advocating Anthropogenic [i.e. man-made] Global Warming (AGW). The recent leaking of about 1,000 emails and 3,000 documents from the CRU has raised serious questions about the credibility of this institution’s research.
Much has been made about the emails sent among leading AGW scientists, many of which imply that there have been “tricks” played with the data to “hide the decline” of global temperatures, as well as a hickjacking of the entire peer review process to shut out all opposing theories. Many of these emails have been explained away by claiming that they have either been taken out of context or the somewhat cryptic use of words like “trick” have a much less sinister meaning than what global warming skeptics.
But there are two things that are far less open to broad interpretation: the raw data and the software used to “prove” that global warming exists and is man-made. If either the data or the software are less than 100% objective, the entire premise of AGW is called into question.
Enter Harry Harris. One of the most revealing CRU documents, which is only now gaining widespread attention, is harry_read_me.txt
Harry_read_me.txt is a 3-year commentary (2006-2009) by a programmer named “Harry” (most likely Ian “Harry” Harris) documenting his frustrations in trying to make the software do what it’s supposed to. I’m no computer geek, but programmers who don’t have an axe to grind in the AGW debate are saying that the software is hopelessly flawed.
In one of the best articles to date on this subject, Congress May Probe Leaked Global Warming E-Mails, CBS News blogger Declan McCullagh recounts some additional clues regarding serious flaws in the CRU software:
Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU’s Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!” and “APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION.” Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: “Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend – so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!”
On April 5, 2007, in a post entitled “Global Warming’ or “Climate Change”?, I wrote, “Some day, we may look back on this debate with as much nostalgia as the epicircles [sic] of the geocentric universe theory.” (Actually, the term of art is “epicycles.”)
Back in the days when everyone thought that the Earth was the center of the universe, as the data became clearer and clearer that this couldn’t be the case, epicycles were geometric models that were used to explain away the variations in speed, direction and motion of the Sun, Moon and planets. Apparently, the code used to model global warming is the 21st Century equivalent of “epicycles,” which is basically what I predicted more than two and a half years ago. But never in my wildest dreams did I ever expect it to be exposed so soon.
I firmly believe that once someone with sufficient expertise in computer programming thoroughly interrogates “Harry,” the computer code is going to be the smoking gun of this whole fraud. Snarky emails can be explained away, the significance of “hiding” the data through various “tricks” depends on what the meaning of the words “hide” and “trick” are, but if the tool they used to reach their conclusions was hopelessly flawed, then all bets are off.
My statistics professor had a name for this kind of cooking of the books: “strangling the data until it confesses.” If I understand this correctly, what we’re witnessing here is the cyber-version of water boarding.