Climate Scientists: Show us your code

What do the climate scientists have to hide?

I”m going to continue to harp on this topic.  Standard procedure in software development includes a few basic things like documenting your code, using a source code management system to keep track of changes, and documenting your environment (hardware and software versions, etc.) to name a few. 

Scientific method requires that “Scientists write out a method (some people call this a procedure) like a recipe.  Materials needed are listed and the steps of the experiment are written out clearly.  Other scientists may want to do your experiment.  They need clear directions to follow.”

Something’s wrong in climate science land.  It seems that there is disregard for both standard software development procedures and the scientific method. 

Here’s some salient quotes from some of the brightest minds in climate science:

“My working directories are always a mess – full of dead ends, things that turned out to be irrelevant or that never made it into the paper, or are part of further ongoing projects. Some elements (such a one line unix processing) aren’t written down anywhere. Extracting exactly the part that corresponds to a single paper and documenting it so that it is clear what your conventions are (often unstated) is non-trivial. – gavin]”

- Gavin Schmidt in a response to comment 89 in the post On Replication on RealClimate.org. His comments highlight the need to follow standard software development practices.

“Unfortunately we have deleted all the NetCDF files that we downloaded after converting them to PP format. It would take some time (more time than I have spare!) to retrieve the data again or convert them back to NetCDF. However, all the data are freely available at esg.llnl.gov:8443/home/publicHomePage.do“

- Thomas Bracegirdle in an email response to Steven McIntyre.  See the post on ClimateAudit.org titled: Connolley co-author: “Unfortunately we have deleted all the NetCDF files…”.  I guess this means “The dog ate my homework”.

During our panel meetings I urged Dikpati to show us her code so we could form an opinion about it, but she refused with the excuse that the code was the result of many years of work and was patch upon patch and so ‘messy’ that it was not ready for public consumption for which it must be cleaned up and documented…I asked her how she could have faith in the correctness of the programming if the code was such a mess, but never got a good answer. Another argument was something about ‘intellectual property’ [of taxpayer funded work???]

- Comments of Mausumi Dikpati, as described in a comment by Leif Svalgaard at 22:11:18 in post on Watts Up With That titled: Scientists Issue Unprecedented Forecast of Next Sunspot Cycle. Mr. Svalgaard was a reviewer of the paper being discussed in the post. Dikpati has obviously been educated at the Gavin Schmidt school of programming.

Does stuff like this make anyone else worry?