Ask HN: Start formal group to peer review climate code?

31 points

17 years ago

Wanted to see if some people had interest in forming a formal group to vet algorithms used to calculate climate data. In the wake of the CRU emails that included questionable programs written to interpolate temperature data, I think there will be a need for an independent review by coding experts.

Maybe a wiki style project with everything laid out in the open.

For the record, I'm impartial and agnostic about climate change because I haven't seen the raw data or the programs used to make future predictions. I think this whole "consensus of scientists so its right" is BS and goes against the scientific method. Plus, climatologists may be incentivised to spread FUD b/c it brings fame and more grant money - plus their expertise is not statistics and writing code.

A software engineer reviews CRU source code - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_buKNBrpcM

I'm sure some funding would not be difficult to find, given the magnitude of all this.

ClimateCodeReview.org? ClimateHackers.org? ClimateCrunchers.org?...

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