Just Read it!

For an interesting look at what goes on behind closed doors, go to http://www.tickerforum.org/cgi-ticker/akcs-www?post=118625&page=13. At issue is a file called HARRY_READ_ME.txt, which, according to the poster, consists of "15,000 lines of comments, much of it copy/pastes of code or output by somebody (who's harry?) trying to make sense of it all ...." Just read it; I'm not going to opine other than to suggest that close inspection of the simulation codes, i.e., the gobbledygook that implements the "models," might prove even more discomfiting. Briggs (see previous post) suggests that the Climategate principals are intelligent. Of course they are. But they're also in over their heads, way over. And doing this stuff in FORTRAN — I say this as a long-time programmer in that language — doesn't make things easier. Nor does it appear, from some of the shenanigans in the code, that the coders were particularly fluent in the language — system calls to "wc" and the like. Yuck!