Part of the problem is that every government has a hand in it, and that since people don't like to pay taxes, many of the governments involved fund the research by reselling the data to private forecast entities. If they open source it (which I fully agree that they should) that revenue stream dries up, a number of businesses are threatened, and your taxes go up. In any case, AIUI the Climate Research Unit was under contractual obligation to the various contributory agencies (in MANY countries) NOT to reveal the information, so all the FOI requests amounted to nothing more than harassment.
In the end, robust code is more expensive than quick hacks. The purloined code has quick hack flavor, no doubt, and in a few places shows somebody who is stuck in a Fortran mentality where a proper scripting language would have been far superior. Whether it was suitable for purpose for said code to be a quick hack is not something I see being discussed anywhere.
Let's stipulate for argument that it was not at an appropriate level of rigor for the task and consider what it means. What it doesn't mean is dishonesty.
I know lots of scientific programmers who find the idea of having to learn Perl or Python terrifying. Pity, but really these are untrained programmers though trained scientists. Anyway, acquiring trained programmers and training them in science or acquiring trained scientists and training them in programming costs a lot of money, and despite what you may have heard, money is very tight in climate science. That said, riskinbg doing things wrong because it's cheaper doesn't make a lot of sense.
In other words, I agree with the sentiments expressed here for the most part but readers should understand that most of them cannot be achieved on a shoestring.
The loss of credibility in science described in the leader is realistic and not without foundation. Science has problems which need to be addressed. An accusatory and adversarial stance, though, will simply throw the baby out with the bathwater. And the CO2 continues to pile up, with consequences that we can anticipate may be very serious.
Anyway I find it odd that the parent article refers to "our" government. Presumably parent author is British?
Michael Tobis,
Ph.D. Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences 1996 at U Wisconsin-Madison