Comment

There's No Conspiracy in the 'Climategate' Emails

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SixDegrees12/05/2009 3:43:59 am PST

re: #419 island

Also, your cited author is wrong - well, lying, actually - about what the ‘interpol()’ function call does. He claims it it will somehow cause the data points to “skew toward” the “adjustment” vector, which is pure, unadulterated bullshit. All interpol() does it perform a linear interpolation of the data - which contains a small number of points - onto a grid with a lot more points. It doesn’t apply any sort of “skew” at all, nor does it introduce any bias.

Why would someone do this? Well, again - it’s typical as part of the preprocessing applied when something is about to be graphed, to make it fit onto a graphing window of some predetermined size - exactly like my speculation on the “fudge factor” of 0.75 is simply scaling the data to make it fit on the graph.

And, lo - what do we behold when we examine the actual, complete code fragment, instead of the nearly microscopic snippet of 4 lines provided by Greiner in support of his explanation? Why, immediately following all these machinations, the code falls into a section that…is obviously a plotting section.

Hey - I wanna thank you for forcing me to finally look at the code. Because after less than two minutes of attention, it is now pretty damn obvious that there is nothing at all sinister going on here, and that the code’s author is simply adjusting the data in a non-distortive fashion to make it the right size for display.

Sorry, but your wet dream of code proving skullduggery on the part of it’s authors just went all dry and sandpapery.