re: #648 Conservative Moonbat

What you can’t answer is HOW MUCH VARIATION in the final results did the bad data cause? Climate research isn’t like trying to land a probe on mars where one faulty calculation can mean disaster for the whole prject. It’s about variation in large sets of data over a long period of time. Outliers can be found and corrected for algorithmically. It’s all about averages.

If the bad data resulted in in various calculations being off by a few hundredths of a percent, it doesn’t matter that much.

You can’t really say anything meaningful with your findings until you can state the DEGREE of error that was introduced.

Harris can…

“They aren’t percentage anomalies! They are percentage anomalies /10. This could explain why the real data areas had variability 10x too low. BUT it shouldn’t be - they should be regular percentage anomalies! This whole process is too convoluted and created myriad problems of this kind. I really think we should change it.”

One example. Read Ian Harris’ narrative. He goes on about many algorithms and formulas that were written wrong.

Download Ian Harris’ 314 pages of programmers notes in PDF format