Climategate
The issue in question is the computer models used. It's not just a question of the legendary phrase, 'Garbage in, garbage out' (GIGO for short), which is the computer programmer's way of saying if you feed rubbish data into a computer, then what it tells you will be rubbish. No, what worries me is a more fundamental point. Without being able to inspect the program, how to you know that it isn't riddled with bugs, and even more seriously how do you know the model on which it is based is correct? Let's look at each of those in turn. Bugs in the program do not necessarily crash it, but they can, instead, change its output in subtle ways. This is especially the case with systems like weather and climate where an error in rounding off the umpteenth decimal place can make the difference between snow and a heat wave. (Butterfly wings and all that chaos stuff!) Unless you can get someone who knows what they are doing to look at the program code, there is no way of knowing how accurately the program represents the model. But there is an even deeper problem than mere program bugs. How do we know the models being used to predict climate change are correct? There is no commonly accepted way of proving a computer model correct, except by using it to make predictions and then verifying that those predictions are correct. Unfortunately, climate models are predicting results tens, or hundreds of years into the future, so it's going to take a while to check the result, by which time it will probably be too late to fix any of the errors. And, if you really want another layer of stuff to worry about, take a look at Orrin H Pilkey's book 'Useless Arithmetic' where he argues that it is impossible to predict physical phenomena like earthquakes and volcanoes with computer models, because while you can model what's physically happening in some, if not most of the triggering events, you can't predict the order in which they will happen - something which massively affects the results. When I was a child, scientists were worried about a new 'ice age', rather than global warming. I'm not convinced that they weren't right. Paleoclimatologists (those who study climate over the entire history of the Earth) tend to be a little less forthcoming over the question of global warming than most. This might be because they consider that we are in the middle of an ice age! Yes really, the well known past ice-ages were not solid periods of ice covering half the planet, they fluctuated between massive glaciation and short (in terms of the history of the planet) periods of warmth, one of which we are in at the moment! For the record we are in the middle of what is known as the Pleistocene Ice Age. In the meantime, the destruction of the original data removes any claim by those involved to be scientists. The essence of the scientific method is repeatability, destorying original data is hight of vandalism. The East Anglian academics involved are now no better than the climate change equivalent of government paid spin doctors. Of course, it might be the case that the global warming reported by the popular climate models is all that's keeping the return of the glaciers at bay...
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