Nov. 25 2009 - 4:35 pm | 14 views | 1 recommendation | 1 comment

Is The World’s Premier Climate Information Cooked?

By JIM NASH

Ho Lee Crap.

If stolen emails between scientists are to be believed, the world’s gold-standard climatic computer model is worthless.

To better understand what I mean, imagine you’re the stewardess played by actress Karen Black in “Airport 1975″. You have to land a huge creaking jet after the flight crew has been sucked out of the cockpit. George Kennedy, on the radio, is griping around his spitty cigar. The passengers are a bunch of whining second-guessers. Hell, both your eyes won’t even point in the same direction.

Actress Karen Black got the plane down. Who's going to save global-warming science?

You and that jet are the best hope for a happy ending (flight crew excepted). Now Sarah Palin comes along and says she can’t guarantee her math that says you have any gas in the tank.

That’s how the situation looks for the highly respected and often-consulted Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, in England.

The stolen email paints a dark and chaotic picture, indeed. At best, the CRU computer model is full of fixes, kludges and Band-Aids. At worst, scientists have been using the system to make climate change look all but inevitable.

Why all the fuss over one piece of software? The university says CRU has the largest collection of temperature recordings in the world. The UN has relied on CRU data in all of its significant climate pronouncements and efforts.

It was hackers, by the way, who stole into university servers, taking barrels of emails and documents.

US politicians have wasted no time making hay with this one, and who can blame them. The Right might finally have a decent issue to scream about.