Man oh Mann - Redux

OK, since some claimed that the Penn State report was biased, we now have the Independent Climate Change E-mail Review report. Yet again the scientists involved are congratulated for producing excellent science. One of the interesting things about this report is that it actually looks at some of the issues involved. For example, one of the main criticisms of climate researchers is that they have not released their code. However the report actually investigated whether this was a real problem. Their finding:

33. Finding: The computer code required to read and analyse the instrumental temperature data is straightforward to write based upon the published literature. It amounts a few hundred lines of executable code (i.e. ignoring spaces and comments). Such code could be written by any research unit which is competent to reproduce or test the CRUTEM analysis. For the trial analysis of the Review Team, the code was written in less than two days and produced results similar to other independent analyses. No information was required from CRU to do this.

The report is full of other goodies such as:

20. Finding: This simple analysis and the comparisons in figures 6.1 and 6.2 give rise to the following findings:

• Any independent researcher may freely obtain the primary station data. It is impossible for a third party to withhold access to the data.

• It is impossible for a third party to tamper improperly with the data unless they have also been able to corrupt the GHCN and NCAR sources. We do not consider this to be a credible possibility, and in any case this would be easily detectable by comparison to the original NMO records or other sources such as the Hadley Centre.

• The steps needed to create a global temperature series from the data are straightforward to implement.

• The required computer code is straightforward and easily written by a competent researcher.

• The shape of the temperature trends obtained in all cases is very similar: in other words following the same process with the same data obtained from different sources generates very similar results.

Of course the report is wrong because the authors are biased, or the day it was published on ended in a "y" or something.