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Comment by eldenwrong | Hacker News Reader

Climate change is one of the most politicized fields at the moment.

Any questioning it, even slightly means being banned from grants and academia.

Its also interesting that most climate models are NOT open source. Most recorded data from satellites is also NOT open source. So everyone works with a pre cleaned data set.

Its also worth pointing out that data sets like HadCRUT have never been audited by any respected scientist/group of scientists. This data was collected in stations not meant for long term measurements and they have a lot of errors. Just download it yourself and see. (Climate scientists are not really data experts, since they go from clean datasets in school to "clean" data sets in real life)

Calculating global temperature is also one of those things that is done in quite an obscure way, extrapolating too much IMO.

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> Most recorded data from satellites is also NOT open source.

This is false. NASA and ESA science data is free.

There is often an embargo period for very novel sensors, and always a delay of hours-to-weeks to allow processing to catch up, but it's free.

If it's the source code of the analysis pipeline you mean -- even though you said data - that's a harder lift, because the processing is complex. But even that is changing (https://science.nasa.gov/open-science-overview).

Even in the absence of the open science initiative above, today you can always get the raw data ("Level 1 radiances") or sometimes even uncalibrated straight-off-the-sensor data ("Level 0"), if you want to process it. (https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/engage/open-data-services-and... -- "All EOS instruments must have Level 1 Standard Data Products (SDPs)")

And if you want to look in to how the processing works, there are detailed documents ("ATBD's") that explain how the pipeline works, for each data product. Also free.

> Climate scientists are not really data experts, ....

Dreadfully wrong. Do you work in this area at all?

You seem to be much more knowledgeable about this than myself. But I was under the impression that while large climate models are used to infer the extent and impact of a changing climate, they are not actually an important component in determining climate change caused by carbon emissions to be a real phenomenon.

No other hypotheses about geophysics are required to show realistic and fault free simulations of the climate of the planet over several centuries to be generally accepted. Why should we apply such extreme prejudice to the hypothesis of climate change caused by the greenhouse effect? The basic mechanisms is quite simple and well understood, there is a variety of kinds of measurements supporting the claim that the temperature of the planet is increasing (meteorological temperature measurements, glaciers disappearing etc.). Full understanding of all the geophysical processes and feedback loops involved is not necessary, and very likely impossible.

I also have a hard time understanding the motives for such an enormous scam. Who would stand to gain from this except a relatively small number of researchers and the renewable energy industry? On the other hand, it's well documented that the fossile fuel industry has tried to sabotage climate science for the purpose of limiting political action on the issue.

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