CRUTEM3 “…code did not adhere to standards one might find in professional software engineering”. John Graham-Cumming, a British computer programmer, says that the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit global temperature analysis programming code isn’t professional. Anthony Watts concludes that this is damning expert opinion.

Sorry John but CRUTEM3, just one of several tools for analyzing global temperature, is scientific code. Done on a tight academic budget, it was basically a one-off effort. Could it be improved? Sure. Is the programming “quality” relevant? Not fundamentally. Does it give a correct result? Apparently. Good work spotting minor errors, but we’re not debating the elegance or efficiency of internet routing protocols here.

Corrections resulting from John's error-spotting in green.

Just as an aside, the fuss over the quote-mined code fragments that were found in the stolen CRU e-mails was about code that wasn’t actually used.