When I Asked A Simple Question About Climate Science Verification...

And all I got back was a reference to a bunch of academic papers and opinions

Being someone who has worked in science and engineering now for over 25 years, how you go from an academic idea to a real-world application requires testing and demonstration of applicability, repeatibility and reliability. Not to mention being safe.

To cut to the chase then, a year or so back I asked the UK government if they had any verification reports or even procedures where they had checked that the science behind Net Zero (the CO2 bit). The check, or “verification” would be to see if yes indeed the basics had indeed been given due diligence in some fashion.

Now as an aside, if you know anything about how one of the basic metrics, the global average temperature anomaly, is put together you’ll see there are a lot of assumptions about the quality of the measurement process. Many models used to try and minimise uncertainty. Which at an academic level is fine as long as you stay within the bounds of your assumptions.

In engineering real-life situations you need to take such scientific ideas and put them through the wringer to make sure they are robust. Often just a cursory analysis of inputs can deem an idea unfeasible as it cannot be measured to sufficient precision. Any derivative conclusions from such data propagate the uncertainty to the results.

In simple terms, if your noise is much larger than any supposed “signal” you don’t have useful data. And your tools are not up to the job.

That’s where you stop.

You can see how finding out if the science of CO2 warming, much exalted by our politicians in their quest for Net Zero, is up to scratch with a basic audit check would be important.

And not just important, a MANDATORY requirement to deem safety if applying it to the real world.

All I was after was some list of documents to see had this been done.

I initially sent in an FOI (Freedom of Information) request but received a reply asking for clarification. I then received a response pointing me to the IPCC as the source of such documents i.e. the government had no due diligence of their own. I asked for a review and after some time they responded with same answer

Here is the final FOI:

Now you could read this and think, Mick, they’ve told you the answer: it’s the IPCC of course!

Well, in aircraft systems verification, for example, there are whole shelves worth of regulations and guidelines including standards such as RTCA DO178 and DO254.

You still have to show compliance to these standards with every new design and change.

So if the IPCC was the STANDARD you would still need to show due diligence that you checked the data that you were basing real-life policy on was up to scratch. And up to scratch is not just that it met academic standards. No, it would have to meet the same standards of precision and repeatibility as bridges, planes, cars, mobile phones and even water safety.

With regards to water safety and equipment standards there’s even a UK law (2016 Water Act).

But as you can see they just point to academic papers, completely outsourcing compliance and in fact responsibility.

If the Met Office still produce papers lamenting on source data uncertainty in the temperature record and showing that they have to use models to get that uncertainty down, that would be like saying you have qualified a plane to fly purely by data analysis with NO ADEQUATE TESTING.

Or putting a spacecraft into space after shaking, thermal and electrical checkout, but using vague data well above required precision that you don’t actually know what the spacecraft variation is.

If an electrical signal could only vary by 0.1V but you could only resolve to 10V then you have a definite clarity problem.

Releasing such a piece of equipment into the real world would seem a very risky thing to do, if not bordering on negligent, even deceitful.

So when we see Net Zero banded about in the UK, you would think if they are so serious about it and that the IPCC was the “source” it would be easy to knock up a quick verification report?

But no.

There’s something truly not right at the heart of this.