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Climategate Code Reveals East Anglia’s ‘Fudge Factor’

How Do You Manufacture a Hockey Stick? 'Value Added Data' = Fudge Factor Applied

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  December 8th, 2009 at 12:01 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

The Climate Scientists at the Hadley CRU may be able to finesse terms of art like “trick” and “hide the decline”, but I’d sure hate to be the guy that had to explain what the programmer’s comments in the following snippet of code really mean, under oath.
;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,'Oooops!'
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)

That’s a snippet of code written in Interactive Data Language (IDL). This analysis courtesy self-described climate agnostic Robert Greiner at a website called Cube Antics, and covered by wattsupwiththat.com in two articles called Climategate: The Smoking Code and The Smoking Code, part 2.

I’m coming to you today as a scientist and engineer with an agnostic stand on global warming. …

First, let’s get this out of the way: Emails prove nothing. Sure, you can look like an unethical a**hole who may have committed a felony using government funded money; but all email is, is talk, and talk is cheap.

Now, here is some actual proof that the CRU was deliberately tampering with their data. Unfortunately, for readability’s sake, this code was written in Interactive Data Language (IDL) and is a pain to go through.

[emphasis in original]

Values in the 'valadj' array

Values in the array valadj

Suffice it to say, that if such a “correction” were to be applied to random, trendless data, it would make them skew upward in the last 25 to 50 years, in a shape that might be said to resemble a ski slope, or even …. a hockey stick!

What’s lacking here is a direct tie between this programming routine and the so-called “value-added” data used by the IPCC. If the raw data indeed no longer exists, it may be difficult to establish a connection.

I’ll leave it to the real engineers and computer experts to sort this out. I’m a technical manager, so my job is to have a highly developed bullcrap detector. And, right now, my AGW bullcrap meter is pegging on ManBearPig.

H/T: The Cooler Heads Digest of the Competitive Enterprise Institute

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COMMENTS

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  • gekster

    It means it can be learned just like anyother language, like English.
    (pun intended) .
    I used it in basic scripts to alter test machines to test for what i wanted.
    To someone who “speaks” the language, its not hard to add in variables
    to change or “skew” the end data.

  • http://www.the41stvote.org rcov092

    The e-mails are turning out ot be just a distraction. The real damning evidence is the code released. That is why they are so desperately trying to focus everyone on the e-mails.

    We need a full, investigation by a Bi-partisan (no stacked deck) commission to delve into the program code. No discussing the politics or the theory, just the programming and the datesets. where are the orginal datasets, I though when you did work for the government under a grant or contract all your work product was public domain. No more government grants to anyone without ownership of the datasets and open posting of same on the internet.

  • Flagstaff

    the destruction of the raw data.

    NO serious scientist or researcher who wants his honest work to be accepted as an accurate description of the real world would allow his raw data to be corrupted, let alone order it to be destroyed. They wouldn’t hesitate to make it public, either. The fact that it’s missing is strong evidence, if not proof, that it did not support the AGWarming theories.

    The next fairy tale to come out of the Climate Change Black Box (now, there’s a hard-hitting name for you), will be that the data was lost accidentally, and/or that lo-and-behold, it has miraculously reappeared and it supports everything they’ve said before, without any fudge factors being applied.

    But they won’t be able to provide a believable chain of possession covering where the data has been while on hiatus.

  • DONTREADONME

    http://www.courierpress.com/news/2009/dec/06/quotclimategatequot-exposes-global-warming-hoax/

    as you know this is form the courierpress evansville. I liked it and thought other should read.

  • Paul_In_Houston

    From my latest (at http://paulinhouston.blogspot.com )
    …
    This is NOT just a scandal of a few purloined emails; it is the perversion of science to cold-bloodily create propaganda, to justify putting the government in complete totalitarian control of our industries, our economy, nearly every detail of how we live.

    …
    What’s at the bottom of all this?

    Pure naked power.

    -

    • Richard Mullins

      Money and Power go together like hand and glove. Al Gore and his minions as well as others love the Power/Money game that goes and on.

      • Paul_In_Houston

        …for providing both the title and subject of the latest post on my blog ( “Don’t forget the money angle, Paul” ), in which I give you full credit and write…

        He noted correctly that money and power go together, and singled out Al Gore as a prime example. I have no argument whatsoever with his observation.

        BUT…

        You KNEW there was a “BUT” coming; didn’t you? :-)

        With the High Priests of this new religion, money is incidental.

        Simple greed can be reasoned with, bargained with, and/or bought off.

        Messianism cannot.

        I continue on in this vein. I only hope I did justice to it.

        -

  • archer52

    http://truthandcommonsense.com/2009/12/07/climategate-will-the-governments-push-past-the-false-science-and-still-wreck-your-life-you-betcha%e2%99%a0/

    From my post. The point I am trying to make here is that sooner or later the citizens of this nation and most of the free world are going to be faced with a choice between submission or resistance. The people who would rule us all aren’t going to change their ways or leave willingly. That’s their fault. However, it leaves little wiggle room for those who seek a life devoted to free will and free choice. As I said in my post,

    “This is a shameful time in our history. If Jefferson were alive, he?d be pulling the plug on the experiment and pushing the reset button with the barrel of his musket.”

  • mschmitt

    Is this the smoking gun for AGW fraud, or the smoking gun for CRU fraud? In other words: is this the presumptive original manipulation of temperature data, or is this CRU manipulating their data (which apparently showed no warming) in order to match the accepted (presumptively also manipulated) result?

    My guess is that it is actually the latter (remember the phrase, “It’s a shame that we don’t show warming”). A couple of different ways to look at this (what happens if you remove the fudge factor? No warming?), but be careful not to get pigeon-holed into what this code means.

    We must find out whether this array is:

    1. meaningless boilerplate in test code (oops)

    2. the conversion factor to return to the raw data (possibly jackpot, if it gives — as expected — refuting results in line with other observations; such as the cooling trend now verified over the last few years)

    3. a correction on the final result used to establish a new result? (the smoking gun for all of CO2 warming, but would require establishing fraud on each and every subsequent non-CRU measurement as well; no small task)

    4. a correction on the final result to match the accepted global result? (the smoking gun for CRU fraud, and an indication of the “culture of academic corruption” in AGW sciences).

    I think any of those (except for #1, which would prove only misdemeanor slopiness) could be politically devastating.

    • bk

      The true scandal is that this info was hacked and leaked. Since that was illegal, the contents are irrelevant and should be ignored.

      Don’t believe me? Ask any Democrat.

      This is similar to the case where Dem strategies to block minority judicial nominees were left out in the open on some Congressional server. Who got in trouble? The GOP staffer who came across them.

      This is NOT similar to oh say the Pentagon Papers or Watergate leaks.

  • USNJIMRET

    And that “2009 will probably end up as one of the warmest years”!
    Surely this declaration, in light of the revelation of previous ‘errors’, has been more carefully sourced, and is now totally empty of any political ‘color’.
    Right?
    I mean the UN wouldn’t be part of the continuation of a hoax, a lie, a deliberate false presentation of manufactured data, serving only to increase the power and authority of Governments world wide, would it?

  • bk

    And I say this as a programmer myself… He documented what was going on because if he had come back six months later for some debugging or another programmer was looking at his code, he would have thought that line was a mistake.

    Plus he probably needed to be able to find it fast as they probably did some tests with different fudge factors until they got the hockey stick they wanted.

    • Mark D

      There’s nothing more annoying than digging into code, be it yours or someone else’s that was not commented clearly. You have no idea what the heck is going on.

      Golf clap for the programmer..

      • bk
  • http://thefallenworld.wordpress.com/ wayneinnh

    Before rendering the charts, there was a warning printed:

    Plotting programs such as data4alps.pro print this reminder to the user prior to rendering the chart:

    IMPORTANT NOTE: The data after 1960 should not be used. The tree-ring density records tend to show a decline after 1960 relative to the summer temperature in many high-latitude locations. In this data set this “decline” has been artificially removed in an ad-hoc way, and this means that data after 1960 no longer represent tree-ring density variations, but have been modified to look more like the observed temperatures.

    Others, such as mxdgrid2ascii.pro, issue this warning:

    NOTE: recent decline in tree-ring density has been ARTIFICIALLY REMOVED to facilitate calibration. THEREFORE, post-1960 values will be much closer to observed temperatures then (sic) they should be which will incorrectly imply the reconstruction is more skilful than it actually is. See Osborn et al. (2004).

    These warnings and disclaimer should have been distributed with every chart. Here is a link to an article on American Thinker analyzing some of the source code.

  • Next93

    Comments don’t mean anything, any more than variable or function names. The only way to get to the bottom of this is to do a full, formal analysis of the code, out in the open, and to publish the results – ALL of the results, including the dissenting voices. Optionally, it would also be an opportunity to create a “standard” open-source model that could be used for future research and a dataset based on known and publicly available source data; researchers could get a license to use the model and dataset for free, but only if they agreed to publish any modifications they make alongside thier results.

    I published this diary about this last week. Take a look.

  • Praying

    was to completely “eliminate” any indication of the medieval warm period (from around 1000 – 1300 AD) and the following little ice age (remember Washington crossing the FROZEN Delaware River?). For a detailed but easy to understand summary of this, see Marc Sheppard’s American Thinker article:

    http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/understanding_climategates_hid.html.

    These guys must be REALLY desperate – I have seen more AP articles in the past two weeks declaring that this decade is the “warmest in history” and that the current year is the warmest on record.” Um… yeah. Snow in Houston? Snow in Sacramento? The audacity of these folks is unbelievable. And the culpability of the media to carry water for these folks is sickening. You are correct. The emails are not the point of the debate. It is the underlying science that is severely corrupt. As is our government as a whole. We must keep pounding out the truth – American citizens have a right to know. We are not nearly as dumb as the political elite would like to believe.

    • skorrent1

      Is important in describing what “hide the decline” after 1960 actually refers to. We have actual temperature measurements by thermometer only since about 1850. There are many anecdotal historical comments about local climate for all of recorded history. What was wanted was something that could give a continuous record and serve as a “proxy” for temperature readings over a longer period. We know by a visual inspection that tree rings, for example, are influenced by seasonal growing conditions (wind, rainfall, humidity, infestations, late frost, late “indian summer”, as well as, voila!, temperature). If we can find some way to examine the tree rings that eliminates all those “extraneous” effects and concentrates on the effects of temperature, we will have a useful “proxy”. And we have tree ring records that go back a thousand years.

      So far, so good. Now we begin to examine tree rings to see if we can find something that correlates well with measured temperatures. After all, the only thing that could influence a long-term trend would be temperature, right? But the problem is we only have a century’s worth of thermometer readings to match up with a thousand years of tree rings. So we do our best to jigger the ring measurements to match up with thermometers (“real temps”) for the period 1860 to 1960, and then assume that we have a good proxy for the temperatures for the preceding nine centuries. And we publish the results!

      The problem comes when, shortly after 1960, the “proxy” measurements stop correlating with the “real temps”. for the last fifty years the correlation has been getting worse and worse. For the last 150 years of recorded temperatures, the “proxy” matches for 100 years (because that’s how we created it) and then diverges for the next fifty. And we are supposed to trust it for 900 years in the past? A true scientist would begin to suspect that our tree ring measurements are not a good “proxy” for temperatures (maybe some of the other factors are important). The CRU gang, instead, blended the early proxy data with recent “real temps” and published the results as if the proxy data were as valid as ever. That, my friends, is scientific fraud!!

  • Nuclearnerd

    This is how engineers get through undergrad. No simulation ever resembles the real world result. We always used factor of 10 to get the right answer. Apparently they didn’t get the memo about that trick not flying in the real world.

  • clement

    but shouldn’t all those numbers be multiplied by .75? the shape of your graph would be the same just the change a little bit smaller, and *slightly* more believable to someone looking at the output data..

    • Vladimir

      The 0.75 is a scaling factor. In other words, it changes the scaling of the graph but not the shape of the curve.

      It is more important for us to know exactly how that array of numbers was used in smoothing, “correcting” or otherwise “adding value” to the raw data.

      That’s for the forensic guys to sort out.

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