Are climate modelers subverting the scientific process?

14. March 2010 · 6 comments · Categories: humour

The Subversion book (it's turtles all the way down)

Here’s the funniest comment from when I visited NCAR the other week. We were talking over dinner about how just about anything the scientists say and do now will be twisted out of context, to try and prove a conspiracy. Never mind “tricks” and “data manipulation”. What happens when the ignoranti find out that the tool used to manage the code for the climate models is called Subversion?

6 Comments

  1. jstults

    What happens when the ignoranti find out that the tool used to manage the code for the climate models is called Subversion?

    They’ll probably start asking for anonymous access to the repo…

  2. Lou Grinzo

    Ouch. I suspect that denier request for ever more detail are effectively a fractal–it’s bottomless and the same to any depth of examination.

    In time I expect them to start asking for the schematics of the computers used to run the models, the sources of the electricity that powered the computers, etc.

    And a certain portion of the population will eat it up with a spoon.

  3. George Crews

    Calling the slippery slope argument a fractal does nothing to its status as a logical fallacy. But I realize the intent here is humor, so:

    For code geeks, the Subversion pun goes deeper. Subversion is the most popular of the “non-distributed” version control systems.

    My favorite code management system is Mercurial. A better fit for an “alarmist” personality don’t you think?

    And according to informal survey the most popular version control system to give a “denier” would be Git.

  4. ligne

    what, climate scientists use git? ad hominem!!!!

  5. Marion Delgado

    We went through this with the iPod app for Skeptical Science:

    Make Andrew Bolt pay the $100 license (for one computer) and get a computer with Snow Leopard. Then let him create all the endless views and controllers and connections in ObjectiveC/Cocoa in XTools for iPhones. I doubt Bolt knows what C practices are, so he’ll probably have to try several times to even get an app declared workable. Then have him document it and test it and so on.

    By the time his app is definitively accepted or rejected, it’ll be 2050, so we’ll have solved it or not before we hear from him again.

    Marion Delgado

    Marion accidentally spills the dirty little secret! Apple insists on controllers to impose their politically correct views, and then they have the gall in a paroxysm of propagandistic doubletalk to call it objective? No wonder there are no “skeptic” apps; even the software tools have a well known anti-skeptical bias!

    Lotharsson

    Lotharsson is in on the conspiracy – he knew the climate realists were already exposing the views and controllers – but the real strength of we elite UN climate czars is our powerful connections. oops.

    Marion Delgado

    But now you’ve gone and told everyone about those powerful connections that I carefully avoided highlighting! What next? Letting the people know about user interface controls installed in every iPhone app

    Lotharsson

    But on this issue, I have to add …
    Sounds like the programmers are turning in their CVs.

  6. Hank Roberts

    I notice Judith Curry talking about “corruption” of the IPCC’s processes.
    Another place where the word can be taken several ways quite easily.

    Aside on Apple — I noticed they reversed their rejection of cartoonist Mark Fiore, and invited him to reapply for the iPad, last week, after his work won a Pulitzer Prize.
    http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_id=61419

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