Video: East Anglia CRU’s below-standard computer modeling
posted at 10:55 am on December 16, 2009 by Ed Morrissey
While the rest of the world focused on the e-mails from East Anglia’s CRU describing attempts to “hide the decline” and silence critics, a programmer in the UK focused on the programming code for CRU’s computer modeling. John Graham-Cumming says he’s not an AGW skeptic, but he’s becoming a skeptic of East Anglia, thanks to its below-standard computer programming for its climate modeling. Breitbart TV has his assessment and damning conclusion in this clip, which gets down to the brass tacks: would you spend money on any conclusions offered by these models? Watch the clip below for the answer:
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fudge factor < pucker factor
rightside on December 16, 2009 at 10:57 AM
THE SCIENCE IS
SETTLEDSCUTTLED.Good Lt on December 16, 2009 at 10:59 AM
That’s very straight up journalism, unusual..
the_nile on December 16, 2009 at 11:00 AM
The thought of NASA coding in BASIC is chilling.
unclesmrgol on December 16, 2009 at 11:01 AM
Fudge is like gravity. It exists.
Christien on December 16, 2009 at 11:02 AM
That’s pretty much the programming code for liberalism.
NebCon on December 16, 2009 at 11:02 AM
@unclesmrgol
Hey, they are using hardware still from the 70s, why not stick with a language as well! ;-p
MikeInBA on December 16, 2009 at 11:03 AM
It’s pretty clear to me what the program, and by extension, the AGW priests are doing.
Vashta.Nerada on December 16, 2009 at 11:03 AM
hey, they put a man on the Moon with 48k of RAM. How’s the manned space program doing in the XP era?
Chris_Balsz on December 16, 2009 at 11:03 AM
Lol. This story keeps getting better and better.
BadgerHawk on December 16, 2009 at 11:03 AM
When does the official lexicon get changed from “flat-earther-deniers” to “justifiably curious sceptics”?
Mord on December 16, 2009 at 11:04 AM
More code snippets from the model:
double GetAverageHomigenizedTemp(int y)
{
double AvgTempThisYear = GetRawData(y);
double AvgTempLastYear = GetRawData(y - 1);
if (AvgTempThisYear < AvgTempLastYear)
{
AvgTempThisYear = AvgTempLastYear + 0.5;
}
return (AvgTempThisYear);
}
WashJeff on December 16, 2009 at 11:04 AM
Fudge factor? I didn’t know these guys were Anglican clergy too.
Rocks on December 16, 2009 at 11:05 AM
This isn’t surprising. Gorebots already knew this, and the rest of us already knew it was bullshit if Gore was involved, especially when putting his own money all-in.
Punditpawn on December 16, 2009 at 11:05 AM
Where is Thomas Frank on this story? Here’s your chance, big guy. GET ON THE STORY.
Or would he rather spend his time penning lamentations and missives about those eeeeevil conservatives and their success in breaking through the leftwing media’s decades-old stranglehold on information distribution that normally would have ignored these kinds of developments?
Exhibit A as to why his industry is dying, and he’s sitting there playing with himself instead of doing anything to fix it.
Good Lt on December 16, 2009 at 11:06 AM
Eww goto statements?
jhffmn on December 16, 2009 at 11:06 AM
Weird science!
artist on December 16, 2009 at 11:06 AM
Maybe we get Sarbanes Oxley to apply to the sciences and academia.
bloviator on December 16, 2009 at 11:06 AM
I think you’re joking, but wouldn’t be surprised if you’re not.
Funny either way. Solid B+.
BadgerHawk on December 16, 2009 at 11:06 AM
LOL…good point…and even funnier is the fact that it took a government program to do it.
Dark-Star on December 16, 2009 at 11:07 AM
Not only garbage in and garbage out, but a really crappy garbage disposer, to boot!
This, ladies and gents, is a great example of “pulling things out of your butt”.
No idea what they’re doing, as long as it makes pretty graphs and charts that support their pre-decided conclusions.
But, they’re SCIENTISTS – Trust them!
No wonder the rest of the scientific community wants to tar and feather these charlatans.
Wind Rider on December 16, 2009 at 11:07 AM
Gore likes fudge. This computer model uses a fudge factor.
Eerie when you really think about it.
Bishop on December 16, 2009 at 11:07 AM
*whistling past my own totally uncommented code…*
Count to 10 on December 16, 2009 at 11:07 AM
As long as we can get Jonah Goldberg’s ‘warm-mongers’ label to stick to the other side I don’t really care what they call us.
BadgerHawk on December 16, 2009 at 11:08 AM
What everyone fails to realize is that fudge is also a greenhouse effect creating substance. This simply takes this into account.
gwelf on December 16, 2009 at 11:08 AM
Seems to be a lot of this going around lately. Hansen’s code at NASA doesn’t even come close to meeting NASA standards. Must have something to do about hiding the agenda.
stephana on December 16, 2009 at 11:08 AM
I got one better for you WashJeff:
MikeInBA on December 16, 2009 at 11:08 AM
The Space Shuttle still runs on Commodore64 processors.
barnone on December 16, 2009 at 11:08 AM
Coding in a fudge factor gives SkyNet the breathing space it needs to take over.
BadgerHawk on December 16, 2009 at 11:08 AM
New definition of the term ‘fudge factor’:
When buffoonish climate scientists bend the whole world over and drive home their claims!
Wind Rider on December 16, 2009 at 11:09 AM
Let me peer review this for you:
double GetAverageHomigenizedTemp(int y)
{
return (double)(y + .5);
}
gwelf on December 16, 2009 at 11:09 AM
Good work Ed. Keep this story alive and make the MSM irrelevant.
Geochelone on December 16, 2009 at 11:10 AM
D’UH
They even put a line in it called “fudge factor”????
This is the code used by the IPCC to produce the data that they used to reach thier conculsions. These conclusions are tha basis for changing entire economic system of the world.
This alone should derail the entire AGW movement.
If they actualy cared about the science.
sonofdy on December 16, 2009 at 11:11 AM
I could have got an A I bet if I used a
gotostatement!WashJeff on December 16, 2009 at 11:11 AM
As long as we can get Jonah Goldberg’s ‘warm-mongers’ label to stick to the other side I don’t really care what they call us.
BadgerHawk on December 16, 2009 at 11:08 AM
Heh
Mord on December 16, 2009 at 11:12 AM
That would explain the hockeystick.
WOW.
I mean just WOW.
sonofdy on December 16, 2009 at 11:12 AM
And the hole in my wall beside my computer keeps getting bigger…
lovingmyUSA on December 16, 2009 at 11:14 AM
fudge factor < pucker factor
rightside on December 16, 2009 at 10:57 AM
fudge factor < pucker factor = fudge packer factor.
Crass, I know…
catmman on December 16, 2009 at 11:14 AM
I would be castrated on the spot if I used a goto unless it was to exit the program immediately.
sonofdy on December 16, 2009 at 11:14 AM
WTF, they are not even using C++ or Objects.
Geochelone on December 16, 2009 at 11:14 AM
Ya, but we’ve only got less than 50 days or 7 years or something before we’re confronted with typhus from rotting polar bear carcasses in our flood ravaged cities- or something.
Ya know!?
Amendment X on December 16, 2009 at 11:15 AM
If you were running the
scamnumbers on health care, I would give you an A-.mwdiver on December 16, 2009 at 11:16 AM
A statistics Phd guy on Rush’s show a few day’s ago said he was looking at the code and said that there where points in the code that were data dependent. I interpreted what he said that their where conditional statements based on the data the SW was processing (i.e., the program was rigged for a predetermined result).
WashJeff on December 16, 2009 at 11:16 AM
No wonder they didn’t want to release anything, they were embarressed about running 30 year old software.
Johnnyreb on December 16, 2009 at 11:17 AM
I’m self taught in VBA programming and I thought I was a hack! I wonder what this poor programmer was being paid?
aikidoka on December 16, 2009 at 11:18 AM
Look, I took a programming class or two back in the day, and my professor was a big believer in making comments in your code to refer to, but I don’t ever remember him saying to use expressions like fudge factor or make a running diary about how how crappy your code was.
Anybody who has written in ADA, the language of choice for the military, often made their comments out loud and there was no need to preserve them for posterity.
Just A Grunt on December 16, 2009 at 11:18 AM
That C stuff was invented in the 70′s way too recent for this critical application. Can we trust an pplication like this to such an infant programming language???
WashJeff on December 16, 2009 at 11:19 AM
I’ve always thought Al Gore looks like he’s a fudge addict.
RBMN on December 16, 2009 at 11:19 AM
basic is okay for some things but i would have thought fortran, pascal, or assembler.
sonofdy on December 16, 2009 at 11:19 AM
This basically says if the temperature is lower then last years, tweak up this years by 0.5 degrees.
Holy shit, what a bunch of tards.
ebrawer on December 16, 2009 at 11:19 AM
Tough manager you have. Usually heavy dose of mocking or laughing in your face is in order.
WashJeff on December 16, 2009 at 11:19 AM
btw where is the source code?
sonofdy on December 16, 2009 at 11:20 AM
(i.e., the program was rigged for a predetermined result).
WashJeff on December 16, 2009 at 11:16 AM
That’s the only part of your comment that made sense to me.
bridgetown on December 16, 2009 at 11:21 AM
No no no no no.
It’s supposed to be exponential growth.
Line 7 S.B.
I miss C++. I’m suck using VBA now a days.
Joe Caps on December 16, 2009 at 11:25 AM
Hey I am already dealing with supporting 20 year old code, no reason to make it worse with even MORE goto statements. In my first job I was dealing with spigetti code in assembler and even hex assembler codes from the 70′s. Talk es going crosseyed. Self adjusting code based on one day of the year. That one took me 2 months to find.
sonofdy on December 16, 2009 at 11:26 AM
The messages about “oops, my programming sucks” are probably in there to give plausible deniability against purposful fraud. “Hey, we never claimed to be programming geniuses” is what we are likely to hear a lot as this scandal advances.
Buddahpundit on December 16, 2009 at 11:26 AM
stuck using VBA*
Joe Caps on December 16, 2009 at 11:26 AM
Jvette on December 16, 2009 at 11:26 AM
I am familiar with the Fortran they use. I have used fortran for the research of mine published in the U.K. Like Dr John Graham-cumming says. It is sloppy and error laden. The way to get by with sloppy programs is to do it in house and not have outside people see or review it.
seven on December 16, 2009 at 11:29 AM
With programming finding the issue takes almost 99% of the time. The fix is usually super easy.
20 year code would just suck. After about 10 years of use and changes, I would say it just needs to be rewritten.
WashJeff on December 16, 2009 at 11:30 AM
It’s not BASIC, its IDL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDL_%28programming_language%29
keving on December 16, 2009 at 11:30 AM
Does anyone think that someone lying about Global Warming would lie just about one item…or that they would try to fool people in just one area.
It will be found systemic, throughout the system…in fact that is what will be their ultimate defense.
It will be so confusing, so many errors, that it will become the “big lie” and most of their supporters will say…”all you are doing is attacking, everything can’t be wrong”, when in essence everything is wrong, since the base evidence, the foundation is wrong, and everything built around that is to magnify that “wrongness”.
It is the ultimate of “BIG LIES”…and the more “wrong” found the better it will become for the deceivers.
right2bright on December 16, 2009 at 11:31 AM
WashJeff wrote that as a joke.
Count to 10 on December 16, 2009 at 11:31 AM
Reminds of programming in QBASIC on a 66/486, where you copied game code line-by-line directly from tiny print in the book.
Good times. <:-}
Dark-Star on December 16, 2009 at 11:31 AM
You may need to clarify that your weren’t pasting the actual code.
BadgerHawk on December 16, 2009 at 11:32 AM
then message, “Oooops”
doginblack on December 16, 2009 at 11:32 AM
ACTON INSTITUTE has a great read on ClimateGate and the lack of Virtue in Science today
http://www.acton.org/commentary/562_science_and_virtue.php
jp on December 16, 2009 at 11:32 AM
May already be happening.
“For the first time, I’m resigned to respecting their dissenting opinion and to strategizing how to move on and make progress anyway.”
I’ve seen a move from “curse those deniers” to “there are skeptics. They’re wrong, but they’re there, and I can respect that,” in more places than just this one.
Politically, though, I suppose this makes their position even worse, because now they aren’t trying to force their will on stupid “deniers” who don’t know what is best for them, but actually on people whose dissent they respect.
kc8ukw on December 16, 2009 at 11:33 AM
‘Fudge Factor’ is a technical term, Hershey’s scientists use it all the time.
mudskipper on December 16, 2009 at 11:33 AM
Computer models are useless with validating testing …
So why not model the last 2000 years and see how they do.
Or you could just measure Al Gore’s warm blanket, you know, the greenhouse signature. That is missing … All computer models that predict are now falsified.
tarpon on December 16, 2009 at 11:34 AM
It don’t matter how much truth is shown, the Liberals will just deny it.
royzer on December 16, 2009 at 11:34 AM
Give ‘em a break. They could have been using an abacus.
turfmann on December 16, 2009 at 11:34 AM
Solid B+ for effort.
JammieWearingFool on December 16, 2009 at 11:34 AM
I just found an error in my code two days ago that was basically a compounded rounding error, because I was begin dumb about summing a few million elements one at a time in an equation where they mostly canceled.
Count to 10 on December 16, 2009 at 11:34 AM
Silly conservatives.
Fudge factor is clearly code accounting for what comes out of the backsides of cows. It’s their steaming pile of methane-producing fudge. You have to account for that!
stvnscott on December 16, 2009 at 11:35 AM
They were trying at the time. The idea was to rewrite it in COBOL but the overnight process that took 1 hour in assembler, took 27 hours in COBOL.
They scraped it.
sonofdy on December 16, 2009 at 11:38 AM
As a programmer I find this curious. If I wanted to “fudge the facts” and try to weasel my way out, I might want to blame it on my bad programming skills too.
“I knew enough to pull data out of a database and get into into a chart. But oh my! What shall I do with this other data? I’ll just purposefully write code that ignores it and just leave a comment that I must be a bad programmer. Silly me!”
I think the programmer was either told to write this “oops” code or purposefully did it himself.
shick on December 16, 2009 at 11:40 AM
I never knew starfleet_dude and sethstorm worked at East Anglia.
kingsjester on December 16, 2009 at 11:41 AM
For a Brit it was devestating, an American would have used colorful and explicit language. But that’s simple not done over there. Certainly not on TV.
Fred 2 on December 16, 2009 at 11:41 AM
I saw a ‘GOTO’ in the code. That’s enough for me.
DarkCurrent on December 16, 2009 at 11:42 AM
Rewrite in COBOL???? I thought that was a dying language when I was getting out of college in early 90′s.
WashJeff on December 16, 2009 at 11:43 AM
WHILE conservative_arguement=true DO
message”Conservatives are racists and hate the poor”
UNTIL conservative_gets_concussion_banging_head_on_wall=true
shick on December 16, 2009 at 11:44 AM
This was in 1989
sonofdy on December 16, 2009 at 11:46 AM
FIFY
DarkCurrent on December 16, 2009 at 11:46 AM
What is most important is that the USHCN’s raw data is adjusted by NASA and NOAA in the same manner.
They use the CRU’s adjusted data as a template for what they are adjusting to.
No wonder Andy Revkin is leaving the NYT’s. Everything he’s written in the past ten years is bunk.
LeeSeneca on December 16, 2009 at 11:46 AM
When they can put 50 years of data in their model and accurately predict yesterdays temperature within a 10th of a degree globally (prove the model), then I might…might start believing this crap. They can’t and never will be able to….
Youngs98 on December 16, 2009 at 11:46 AM
lol
cmsinaz on December 16, 2009 at 11:49 AM
Don’t worry. Once Obama renegotiates NAFTA this will all be taken care of.
O wait…
Joe Caps on December 16, 2009 at 11:49 AM
Oh, I don’t know. It’s possible that someone will do it someday.
Although you are probably right that it wont be this set of ‘they’.
Count to 10 on December 16, 2009 at 11:50 AM
Wrong thread…sorry.
Joe Caps on December 16, 2009 at 11:50 AM
I don’t think they wanted to be THAT obvious.
sonofdy on December 16, 2009 at 11:50 AM
I thought he was saying that some areas that should have been data dependent were hard coded with “data.”
As for Cobol, I’ve never even seen Cobol code personally and I’m a month and a half away from being 27 and I have my degree in computer science if that gives you any ideas on where Cobol is in the “coding” world.
MobileVideoEngineer on December 16, 2009 at 11:59 AM
Fudge Factor???? I thought this was about AWG, NOT Safe Schools Czar????
PappaMac on December 16, 2009 at 12:01 PM
Whew! UNderstandable then.
WashJeff on December 16, 2009 at 12:06 PM
If NASA and NOAA were using legitimate science, they would be more outraged than anyone about what has been found at CRU. They can’t even make excuses for CRU like the media and politicians can because it would be an admission that they use similar methods. With their silence, one can only conclude that they knew about and were in on the fraud all along.
Buddahpundit on December 16, 2009 at 12:07 PM
As a commercial software engineer with 30 years of experience (odds are you currently have at least one of my programs on your system right now)I can tell you I would be fired for code like that.
And we are basing an economy on it?
kurtzz3 on December 16, 2009 at 12:07 PM
Obama: “We are on the precipice of understanding what happened with the GW data.”
csdeven on December 16, 2009 at 12:08 PM
Why are they using BASIC? That should discredit anything they’re doing, right there.
Daggett on December 16, 2009 at 12:08 PM
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