GISSTEMP In Clear

Begun several years ago by the staff at software engineer consultants Ravenbrook Limited, the Clear Climate Code project is an attempt to reproduce software used by climate scientists in a more user-friendly programming language (Python vs., for example, Fortran) so that anyone, denialists included, might be able to download raw data and manipulate it easily. The end result should be, according to the clear coders, an increased confidence in the results of climate scientists.

Clear Code has now reached an important milestone in its first big project:

... an all-Python reimplementation of GISTEMP, the NASA GISS surface temperature analysis.

And here's the chart that results from running this reimplementation:



As the lads at Clear Code note:

The results of running this release match GISTEMP results very closely indeed.

In fact, the annual global, northern hemisphere, and southern hemisphere anomaly results are identical, as are the southern hemisphere monthly anomalies. The global monthly anomalies differ 7 times, out of more than 1000, each time by one digit in the least-significant place.

...which should be surprising to no-one. By the way, the Clear Code programmers are looking for help as the project moves forward. There's a link to their mailing list here.