Climate Data: An ISO/TS 8000-110:2008 Issue
By Karl J. Hansen et al., klimabedrag.dk
Big policy, big Industry, nations' livelihood, our way of life and quality of life itself, has been and is going to be Based On Data, both raw and processed, both instrumental and non-instrumental.
The quality of these data, and the way they are processed, is of the utter most importance. The data used to determine almost all aspects of our climate knowledge comes from many into few sources and are copied to many instances of processing. These processes spawn their data to yet multiple other processing instances.
The climate data travel on such dangerous roads going from instrument to radio-link, from radio-link to computer-filter, from computer-filter, to storage, from storage to unification process, from there to... It is an endless chain, that even multiply along the way. All large industries and even small ones, have such scenarios. Climate science is, with respect to data, no different from our everyday industries, except that more people rely on the climate data for studies all over the world and for critical information.
The "normal" industries have for decades been adhering to quality control in all areas of engineering, production, logistic and service. But when scientists deliver mission critical data for the global climate, they appear beyond the need for any formal protocol. This despite there are laid out definitions and protocols to accomplish such quality control by means of ISO/TS 8000-110:2008 and many other such ISO norms.
ISO/TS 8000-110:2008 specifies general, syntax, semantic encoding and data specification requirements for master data messages between organizations and systems. The focus of ISO/TS 8000-110:2008 is on requirements that can be checked by computer.
The Industry Standard Organization was formed many years ago for very good reasons and adhering to the standards they prescribe is something to be proud of. When you produce based on the ISO norms, your customers have better reason to have faith in your product. The same goes for climate science or any other science for that matter.
A fundamental thing behind the ISO norms is that you must always be able to trace integrity and steps for former processes, kind of at any time being able to trace back to the origin. There is very good reason for this. When your final product, whatever it is, turns out to be faulty or have quality issues, you need to trace back to figure out where things went wrong and thereby sort out the mistakes.
Quality control is applied to even the simplest of things, even the production of a teddy bear (not polar bear though). It is beyond believe that one of the worlds most important issues ever is based on climate data without rigorous formal ISO quality control.
Customers of an industrial product would, more often than not, demand proof of quality. It should be the world-population's right to demand that any important decision, treaty or official proclamation, from COP16 or similar decision-making bodies, is founded on science based on data conforming to the highest possible proven quality. If this is not satisfied, any decision based on such data should not be valid.
A demand for rigorous formal quality control might appear unnecessary, because of our believe that every scientist's, compueter programmer's and enginer's sense of quality will ensure reliable data sets, which everyone can use in good faith. However, the same quality-sense apply to the engineers in the teddy bear factory, and still the ISO norms are applied here. This, because even though every expert in their field is doing their best, they will undoubtedly make both minor and major errors. Errors that only can be debunked if all processes, from start to finish, are audit-able and historic data are available, complete, documented and accessible.
If the decision-makers at COP16 cannot prove the data they make the decisions on are founded on ISO/TS 8000-110:2008 or similar, then COP16 should be called off until such time certified data are available.
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