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Comment by hop | Hacker News Reader

I am biased - not about climatology, but having been in grad school and seen it first hand, I am biased about scientists motives, especially when you are competing for millions of dollars of grant money. I also know its easy to fit big data sets to a desired conclusion.

I care about being confident that the data supports the conclusion. I want all the data in the open and open to scrutiny. Whether the Earth is cooling, heating, staying the same - I just want it proven with open source code, not on a consensus of people I don't know using data hidden from the public, with code that I haven't read.

Edit: I am sure the vast majority of scientists are true to the data. And this project will only help reinforce their work.

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I am biased about scientists motives, especially when you are competing for millions of dollars of grant money.

You raise legitimate points and I think the idea of open-source climate modeling (perhaps using BOINC or something for distributed processing) is an excellent one.

Unfortunately, I think the value of your proposal is obscured by comments such as the one above. Surely, scientists do compete for millions of dollars in grant money, but I'm also a bit biased about vested interests that are competing for billions (or perhaps even trillions) of dollars in revenue from the sale or processing of fossil fuels, with any inconvenient externalities dumped on the taxpayer. To be sure, such fuels have been essential progress and are an important factor of future economic growth, but suppliers are not necessarily altruistic either.

Even if you could get ALL the data in an open and transparent format and were able to scientifically prove that "Global warming is (100% real/fake)" it wouldn't matter because the political/corporate/celebrity forces on the other side would claim that you are "using bad science, corrupt, in the pocket of (liberal elites/big corporations)". Even if you proved that there isn't enough data to prove anything, both sides would say you are wrong.

It's still worthwhile.

A grab-bag of replies before I get back to work. (Yes, on a Sunday; sigh.)

- The notion that science can be "proved" is a mistaken one.

- I don't think there's much question by anyone that there has been measurable warming this century; so that part of your question is answered. ;)

- How much of the data is really "hidden"? There certainly hasn't been a effort to widely distribute it from a central source (until lately: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/), but that doesn't mean it was under lock and key either.

Personally, I am biased in the other direction: I feel that it is likely that the extreme pressure and politics involved are forcing climate scientists to be over-conservative in their conclusions.

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