Climategate- The "Harry Read Me" File

Hackers ^ | 12.2.09 | Joe Seales

[JoeSeales]

The “Harry Read Me” File Is A Must Read On Climategate

Yesterday, Glenn Beck had on “Welcome To Obamaland” author James Delingpole from across the pond to discuss Climategate and the decision by climatologist Phil Jones to ’step down’ after all those hacked e-mails were released.

About midway through the interview, Beck asked Delingpole what was the one “earth-shattering” thing that everyone should understand about Climategate. His answer was a file called “Harry Read Me”. Harry Read Me is a file that documents the frustration of a programmer who is trying to manipulate the climate data in a program to give climatologists the result that they want. It even documents that the real “raw” climate data has been erased. Delingpole called it “data-raping”.

The document is not only very telling of the data manipulation going on, but it is also quite funny to read the programmer’s frustrating comments when he can’t get the program to “work”. Here are just a few excerpts:

“What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah- there is no ’supposed,’ I can make it up. So I have : – )”

“You can’t imagine what this has cost me — to actually allow the operator to assign false WMO (World Meteorological Organization) codes..."

“OH F— THIS. It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done, I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases.”

Before we spend 145 trillion dollars on fixing a problem that doesn’t exist, all of the facts should be presented- including these. However, since the media will not touch this, once again we’ll all have to do their job and pass this around.

See the file here: http://www.joeseales.com/2009/12/02/the-harry-read-me-file/

[Deagle]

Tried following the information but was just a bit over my head. I’m sure that many here will find it more explanatory and advise us. It does look like a good site for information though...

[Deagle]

I will note that I tried to follow the code (C) but gave up as unless it is taken in consideration of the whole, not exactly precise. There are sections that make little sense though...leaving it up to other coders to make some sense of it.

[Thebaddog]

This is really something. America will be the very last to catch on, but we will.

[plangent]

Whoaaa! Wait a minute.

CRU says the dataset gathered from meterological stations around the globe was destgroyed in 1980!

Now what data was Harry (actually Ian (Harry) Harris) working on?

It couldn’t be the base data — that was gone. Was he frustrated at having to wrestle with the “twiddled” data that Jones & Co. had given him?

And, to further confound the issue. What dataset was the base (or original) data that other climate scientists used for their evaluations. And if their results approximated what the CRU had published, after torturing the original data into screaming, how reliable is the meterological station data they worked with -— or was it all the same?

[Lloyd227]

Hey folks,  check this out.  There is a way to make your voice heard where it might actually count.

The Climate Pool  (on Facebook)

Their "Mission Statement"

The Climate Pool is a hub for a global discussion on the Climate Summit in Copenhagen, planned to run from December 7-19. It is a Facebook fan page managed by leading news agencies all over the world which are members of the global media network MINDS International.

The issues at stake in Copenhagen affect the lives of billions of people in coming years. The summit, whatever the outcome, is likely to grip the attention of masses of news consumers the world over – yet the complex scientific underpinnings and attendant competing interests make the role of serious journalism more important than ever.

Around this journalism we hope to drive debate of the myriad aspects of the event with readers around the world.

The news agencies involved will be posting blog items, linking to relevant content and driving debate on the page’s discussion boards as well as by using other tools of social media – moderating those discussions in accordance with the highest journalistic standards. This site is not aimed at replicating the traditional media coverage of such an event but of providing back stories and a forum for analysis and various points of view. Many of the participating news agencies will concentrate on national aspects concerning their home markets; some will focus more on a global market. All are committed to jointly providing a new model for collaborative journalism and reader engagement. To avoid language barriers, all content of this site will be in English.

The following MINDS news agencies will actively contribute stories in the Notes section:

• AFP - Agence France-Presse
• ANP - Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau
• AP - The Associated Press
• APA - Austria Presse Agentur
• APcom - APcom Agencia di stampa
• CP - The Canadian Press
• DPA - Deutsche Presse-Agentur
• Kyodo – Kyodo News
• Lusa – Lusa Agência de Notícias de Portugal, S.A.
• PA – Press Association
• RIA – RIA Novosti

**************************************

Locate them on your Facebook account by searching on  The Climate Pool
If you do not have a Facebook account,  this one item alone is enough to justify getting one. 

Then help me and the rest of us  "let em have it"  :-)

[Travis McGee]

bttt

[Cicero]

For some reason, my computer won’t bring up the full note. But those extracts are certainly very incriminating.

Yes, this is crime, and these folks should be fired from their jobs and prosecuted for stealing government funds.

[SueRae]

Great work Joe!! I’m no Software weenie but I’ve worked around it enough to see a very haphazard longterm lack of any process control or configuration control over the changes and manipulations this programmer tried. I’ll forward this to those smarter than I to see if they can discern more detail.

[SueRae]

I had to click on the ‘plain text’ option to see it.

[Roses0508]

As did I. Gave me a headache. I am no longer a programmer, but I was for many years. How can you expect to get a viable outcome from that kind of mishmash. Did you notice the hundreds of uses of the word “synthetic”. I’d like to know exactly what that means. Its obvious from his notes that the data was in no way consistent and they were endeavoring to “normalize” it come hell or high water - even if the results were inconsistent. Its also obvious that he was working off a set of data that had already been “normalized” by a previous programmer and that programmer had left little in the way of documentation and certainly nothing to give anyone confidence that the data had been “normalized” in an appropriate way.

This really is an incredible thing to read. I can’t imagine trying to work in those conditions.

[SueRae]

That work is more than sloppy at best. It wouldn’t have passed any independent audit or review that I’ve ever seen conducted.

[Chode]

it never ends...

Back to precip, it seems the variability is too low. This points to a problem with the percentage anomaly routines.

See earlier escapades - will the Curse of Tim never be lifted?

A reminder. I started off using a 'conventional' calculation:

absgrid(ilon(i),ilat(i)) = nint(normals(i,imo) +

*

anoms(ilon(i),ilat(i)) * normals(i,imo) / 100) which is: V = N + AN/100

This was shown to be delivering unrealistic values, so I went back to anomdtb to see how the anomalies were contructed in the first place, and found this:

DataA(XAYear,XMonth,XAStn) = nint(1000.0*((real(DataA(XAYear,XMonth,XAStn)) / &

real(NormMean(XMonth,XAStn)))-1.0)) which is: A = 1000((V/N)-1)

So, I reverse engineered that to get this: V = N(A+1000)/1000

And that is apparently also delivering incorrect values. Bwaaaahh!!

[steelyourfaith]

 

Beam Me to Planet Gore !