I'm guessing here that these bozos got some climate science graduate students with minimal programming experience to do all of their coding for them instead of hiring professionally trained programmers and database managers. The students were smart enough, however, to cover their ass by making a list of all the mistakes that have accumulated both unintenionally and intentionally in the programs and data files. My experience in academia was that professors preferred working on the cheap, using free student labor in exchange for good "project" grades. I was a student software developer working on a grant for statistical analysis of software reliability for the Air Force. Based on what I saw, the professor did a song and dance and pocketed most of the grant money.