Steve Milesworthy,
I disagree with you on all of your responses. I’ll respond to your last paragraph first:
So I don’t accept your arguments that the failure of establishing suitably transparent “due diligence” that meets the needs of policy makers and commercial interests is all the fault of the scientists.
I didn’t say it was all the fault of individual scientists (in most cases,; there are exceptions). I see it as the fault of a combination of:
• UN IPCC
• Organisations like CRU who earn more money by promoting alarmism
• Left leaning governments who gain by promoting the scare – it leads to more control more regulation, more bureaucracy, more taxes
• Government funding and grant selection processes
• Lack of the processes needed to document the evidence needed to support decisions for multi-trillion dollar investment
Nullius in verbia’s point 1, aside from setting unrealistic/undefined standards cannot even be begun by scientists alone.
Quality assurance of this information should have started 20 years ago. The UN IPCC has resisted transparency. (e.g. reviewers comments and responses for AR4 not documented and publically available)
You responded to my three points:
There are several things stopping us having due diligence:
1. The implacable opposition of the Climate Scientists and all the insiders
2. The funding and establishment of an impartial organisation capable of doing the job
3. The fact that the information is not properly documented.
I’ll deal with your replies:
1. is untrue except in limited hyped circumstances that are not core to the assessment of the economic costs.
I disagree. The implacable opposition to due diligence definitely true. But it is not coming from scientists. It’s driven more by the alarmists in general – environmental NGOs, ideologically Left political parties and the broad group of alarmists coaxed along by web sites like RealClimate, Skeptical Science and many other similar advocacy sites.
2. For the most part, scientists are impartial. You may have a complaint that they are not going about their job in the way you would like them.
That response does not address the point I made.
Yes, for the most part, scientists are impartial. I am not criticising the vast majority of individual scientists. But I do say there is an enormous case of group think and herd mentality. You get funding if you can link your research project to providing evidence to support the climate change scare campaign. That is indisputable.
3. Define “properly”. Several million has been spent on improving data documentation in the last several years
Spending is an input. What is the output. Is the documentation sufficient to enable the relevant inputs to economic analyses to be independently replicated. The answer is most definitely ‘NO’. Therefore, the documentation is nowhere near good enough. Much of the data and methodology is not released – still!!
The simple fact is no due diligence has been done. It is irresponsible that governments are committing to enormous expenditures without having done due diligence
I fear this discussion is bogging down in irrelevancies and avoiding the point.
My point is that:
1. objective, impartial, economic analyses have not been done to the standard necessary to justify multi-trillion dollar investment in mitigation policies
2. the scientific reports and documentation are nowhere near good enough to support a due diligence investigation at the standard appropriate for the level of investment being proposed
3. no due diligence investigation has been done,
4. If it was done it would show clearly that the investment is not justified.
