...............Maintaining databases of information during the last 30 years has been incredibly difficult, and often requires reformatting the data and re-saving to a different media every 5 years or so at great expense...........
Yeah I agree, but I don’t understand.
If these “scientists” are constantly revising, smoothing, and “improving the models”, that must mean that the beginning of any formula must start with the base number that they are modifying. Since they’re not using a Friden totalizer, or a slide rule, each model must contain the beginning number before it was modified, in digital format.
Thus, isn’t all the data already in digital form, useable in todays format?? Then can’t they take their model output, run the formula backwards to solve for the unmodified data??
Color me stupid!
They could probably have saved all that data on one SD card.
In principle (given enough knowns and unknowns), yes, the calculations (at least most of them) can be run backwards. Unfortunately, this is a very complex process to complete. In addition, according to DEFINITE notations in various programs, there were adjustments (fudge factors) that were applied to only a small portion of the data points. That type of procedure enormously multiplies the universe of possibilities that has to be investigated, and may well mean a “solution” is impossible to reach.
The amount of data that was released by the “whistleblower” is ONLY 60 Mb. My lab easily generated 50Mb of RAW DATA in one minute! I’m not including EMails, computer programs, many many iterations of processed data, personal notations, spreadsheets, designs of equipment or programs, financial information, personnel records, and so on and so forth. There is a HUGE amount of simple DATA, EMail and COMPUTER COMMENTS and programs as well as intermediate calculation steps that have not been released in this data dump that really ought be examined if we really hope to reconstruct the situation in this AGW community.
Note that I addressed what your comment says about intermediate calculations and data. These have not been inculded in this whistleblower dump.
I guarantee that MUCH of the needed info resides on computer and backups (we did and SAVED daily, weekly, monthly and annual backups) ... in the US. Getting it, and then analyzing what it tells us is critical, but very very difficult.