I'd venture that most software geeks are fairly leftist and generally support the theory that human activity is causing global warming. In that light, the biggest revelation from the recently hacked global warming emails might be the awfulness of the climate simulation code.
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 libray subroutines that appear to be
- far from ideal in how they do things when the work
- do not produce an answer consistent with other way to calculate the same thing
- but which fail at undefined times
- and where when the function fails the the program silently continues without reporting the error
AAAAAAAAAARGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!
More code analysis.
I'm pretty proficient at writing simulation software: it's how I earned my PhD and how I earn a living. I've also worked closely with self-trained programmers who only write code to advance their research in other fields, and I can tell you that their code is almost always terrible. Writing good software is extremely difficult, and it doesn't surprise me at all that the climate modeling software is so bad as to be useless. It is always wise to be skeptical about the outputs of simulations, especially if you cannot see the source code for yourself.
