Instapundit has a roundup this morning, including this — the fix is in:

The picture that emerges is simple. In any discussion of global warming, either in the scientific literature or in the mainstream media, the outcome is always predetermined. Just as the temperature graphs produced by the CRU are always tricked out to show an upward-sloping “hockey stick,” every discussion of global warming has to show that it is occurring and that humans are responsible. And any data or any scientific paper that tends to disprove that conclusion is smeared as “unscientific” precisely because it threatens the established dogma.

For more than a decade, we’ve been told that there is a scientific “consensus” that humans are causing global warming, that “the debate is over” and all “legitimate” scientists acknowledge the truth of global warming. Now we know what this “consensus” really means. What it means is: the fix is in.

It also makes one wonder — what else have these people and their enablers in the media been lying to us about?

[Update a few minutes later]

Three things you absolutely must know about the scandal.

[Update a few minutes later]

For those who want to get their geek on, here’s a preliminary code review:

I’ve examined two files in some depth and found (OK so Harry found some of this)

* Inappropriate programming language usage
* Totally nuts shell tricks
* Hard coded constant files
* Incoherent file naming conventions
* Use of program library subroutines that appear to be

o far from ideal in how they do things when they work
o do not produce an answer consistent with other way to calculate the same thing
o but which fail at undefined times
o and where when the function fails the the program silently continues without reporting the error

Yes, let’s completely upend the world’s economy over results like this.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s more:

We have here a stellar example of it in real life in the above example where a “squared” value (that theoretically can never become negative) goes negative due to poor programming practice.

There are ways around this. If a simple “REAL” (often called a FLOAT) variable is too small, you can make it a “DOUBLE” and some compilers support a “DOUBLE DOUBLE” to get lots more bits. But even they can have overflow (or underflow the other way!) if the “normal” value can be very very large. So ideally, you ought to ‘instrument’ the code with “bounds checks” that catch this sort of thing and holler if you have that problem. There are sometimes compiler flags you can set to have “run time” checking for overflow and abort if it happens (there are also times that overflow is used as a ‘feature’ so you can’t just turn it off all the time. It is often used to get “random” numbers, for example.)

But yes, from a programmers point of view, to watch someone frantic over this “newbie” issue is quite a “howler”…

And this:

So we have a tacit confirmation that they start with GHCN data. That means that ALL the issues with the GHCN data (migration to the equator, migration from the mountains to the beaches…) apply to Hadley / CRU just as they do to GIStemp.

Both are broken in the same way, so that is why they agree. They use biased input data and see the same result.

And this:

BTW, IMHO it would be easy to make an alternative Global Temperature Series. “Mc” is quite right that it is easy. I could have one in about a day (less if I didn’t want to think about the details too much) and it would be more accurate than GIStemp. How? Simply by “un-cherry picking” some of the GIStemp parameters then running the code.

I finds the dig at “real science” vs “procedures” interesting. How can you have reliable science if your procedures are broken? I learned about “lab procedures” and the importance of them very early in chem lab. Anyone who disses the merit of sound procedures is an accident waiting to happen… IMHO. And will produce errors from unsound procedures.

But the overall thing that I pick up from this is just the tone of True Believers. These folks really do think they have it all worked out. And that is a very dangerous thing. It leads to very closed minds and it leads to very strong “selection bias”. Often with no ability to self detect that broken behaviour.

You know, I think there will be a great deal of insight come from this “leak”…

The climate gods have feet of clay. What’s sad is that people like commenter and defender Chris Gerrib (who had never even heard of induction until this discussion) and many politicians (e.g., Al Gore) are incapable of understanding the degree to which this invalidates the entire enterprise, because of their ignorance of epistemology.