Is Global Warming a Fraud?

If by fraud you mean "Bernie Madoff," then no. But right now it is looking a lot like those AAA-rated CDOs-squared where no one can figure out who actually holds the title anymore.

For years we heard of hedge funds populated by all-star teams of mathematicians and computer scientists running Google-sized server farms, and to be sure, a few of them do really exist. But when the world blew up last year, we discovered that many of the "sophisticated risk models" and "black box" quant systems more often looked like a disheveled pile of Excel spreadsheets held together with chewing gum.

As the furor over the Climategate emails subsides, we come to a more damning indictment. The emails, while full of spicy innuendo, are of a part with peering inside J. Edgar Hoover's lingerie drawer: you might prove that Hoover was a weirdo, but not that he framed the Rosenbergs. But like the Venona intercepts, the CRU's data sets and program code are an objective record of action that supersedes any question of intent. What we see, peering more closely behind the wall of "settled science," is that:

1. Many thorny questions were settled by little more than Kentucky windage
2. Those corrections were applied so long ago that no one really remembers the reasoning process for applying them anymore
3. The original data is largely kaput, so you're just going to have to trust us that the correction was for the best.
   

This, to put it mildly, is horse hockey.

I withhold total denunciation of the entire enterprise for the moment, because it's not yet clear to me how much the world of global warming science depends on this particular dataset. Deniers are naturally clamoring to label it all suspect, while disciples of the hypothesis have every reason to minimize it. It is clear, however, that one thick leg of the table is at the very least in need of repair.

I truly hope that the dataset can be reconstructed or usefully reverse-engineered, regardless of what it shows. In the meantime, I hope this gives the "science is settled" crowd a bit more humility in how they denounce those of us who have questioned the sophistication of the models.