It’s just another example of the new perspective being drilled into younglings now. Don’t reuse or repair when you can replace. There’s no possibility of a rollback, only forward fixes. Sorry, we can’t migrate any data from one system to another, workers will have to enter it all again* in their free time! There’s money in these approaches, and firms (even large ones that used to have excellent reputations) are tripping over each other to get it.
*I heard that one from nurses angrily discussing that extra work involved with new software at two different healthcare organizations in the past year. Since then I’ve been converting my own medical history details and arriving 20 minutes early for appointments, completely unsurprised that they ask me to fill out the same healthcare history forms every time.
The usual suspects are going to use this to claim that the models are out of date, and that those tricksy climate scientists are going to just rewrite everything so that they were right all along, as opposed to the current situation where the climate scientists were almost right all along, and where there were deviations between prediction and result, the climate scientists were too optimistic.
Technical debt is a thing. This isn’t saying to write the models, just the code which is implementing the models. Which, if it’s been bouncing around for decades, maintained and cargo-culted by postgrads, with various assumptions baked in to the original code, then slowly replaced by hacked-on routines to override this given, or turn that constant into another feedback system, then it’s going to be well past the state where it can be maintained. At some point, preferably earlier rather than later, someone’s going to need to take it apart, see how all the bits work now, then put it back together in a way which will allow it to be used and added to in the future. Do it in Fortran again if you like. The technology to some extent doesn’t matter. How well it works, and how well it can be maintained and updated matters. And part of the process will be taking all the predictions made on the old version, running it through the new version, and eliminating or explaining all the differences. (It could well be that the old crufty version was wrong in some details, but the code was so convoluted and relying on so many undocumented side-effects, that nobody noticed.)
I didn’t see the Git repo the first time through, but it does look like they haven’t binned all of the Fortran entirely. There’s a lot of material there…
Any day I get to see and hear him say something, it’s a good day.
When I can, I pick up multiple copies of Born a Crime at the secondhand bookshops in Austin. Great for birthdays, holidays, people in the hospital who want to read something and hate TV; I’ll take any opportunity I can get to spread his work around.
Hope lawsuits like this are successful. Corporations that played a major role in the current climate crisis should pay for solutions needed in affected areas:
Can I interest you in a spot with a lovely view over Hudson Bay where, depending on who you ask, the land is rising between 0.6 and 1.7 cm per year. (Just think of the icy 110km/h winter winds as a power generation opportunity… live off grid! Put global heating back in the “good things” column! /s)
Chisasibi is actually in my destination plans for a road trip. The rising land levels have put land at the edge of Hudson Bay into Nunavut. It’s one of the very few places where you can drive (almost, maybe 200m to walk) to Nunavut.
There’s a lot of material there…
where, 
(Just think of the icy 110km/h winter winds as a power generation opportunity… live off grid! Put global heating back in the “good things” column! /s)