Make Way for the Code Breakers

AJ Strata at The Strata-Sphere has been doing a fantastic job of decoding the computer language and data behind the now-infamous junk science assertions of the "hockey team" cabal who have been blaming you and me (and our livestock, pets, stoves, furnaces, vehicles, and lightbulbs) for the global warming that's been going on ever since the Great Ice Age ended about 10,000 years ago.

A lot has come out since November 24th, when Strata wrote:

I can now understand why Jones and Co. were so resistant to providing code and data – it would not take long for the army of skilled skeptics with backgrounds in science, engineering, math and programming to unravel the truth. And now that the dirty laundry is in the hands of 100’s of sharp minds on the internet, were are discovering the depth and breadth of the AGW con.

[snip]

I have seen inklings of how bad the CRU code is and how it produces just garbage. It defies the garbage in-garbage out paradigm and moves to truth in-garbage out. I get the feeling you could slam this SW with random numbers and a hockey stick would come out the back end. There is no diurnal corrections for temperature readings, there are all sorts of corrupted, duplicated and stale data, there are filters to keep data that tells the wrong story out, and there are create_fiction sub routines which create raw measurements out of thin air when needed. There are modules which cannot be run for the full temp record because of special code used to ‘hide the decline’.

How right Strata was! From Marc Sheppard at American Thinker:

In two other programs, briffa_Sep98_d.pro and briffa_Sep98_e.pro, the "correction" is bolder by far. The programmer (Keith Briffa?) entitled the "adjustment" routine “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!” And he or she wasn't kidding. Now IDL is not a native language of mine, but its syntax is similar enough to others I'm familiar with, so please bear with me while I get a tad techie on you.

Here's the "fudge factor" (notice the brash SOB actually called it that in his REM statement):

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

These two lines of code establish a twenty-element array (yrloc) comprising the year 1400 (base year, but not sure why needed here) and nineteen years between 1904 and 1994 in half-decade increments. Then the corresponding "fudge factor" (from the valadj matrix) is applied to each interval. As you can see, not only are temperatures biased to the upside later in the century (though certainly prior to 1960), but a few mid-century intervals are being biased slightly lower. That, coupled with the post-1930 restatement we encountered earlier, would imply that in addition to an embarrassing false decline experienced with their MXD after 1960 (or earlier), CRU's "divergence problem" also includes a minor false incline after 1930.

And the former apparently wasn't a particularly well-guarded secret, although the actual adjustment period remained buried beneath the surface.

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).

Care to offer another explanation, Dr. Jones?

It just gets worse and worse. Watts Up With That? has published enough of the code notes to give non-computer-geeks an even more sickening picture of just how brazen and unapologetic this fraud was.

The University of East Anglia researchers got about £13 million (about $22 million in today's devalued dollars) to trump up man-made global catastrophe.

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