Climate Science Needs a Quality System — Not belief. Not denial. Audit.

We demand standards before trusting medicine, aircraft, bridges, and spacecraft.

Medicine

Clinical trials, safety, monitoring, regulatory review

Phase I-IV trials, ICH-GCP, FDA / TGA / EMA review, post-market vigilance. Decades of accumulated method, with explicit reliance classes.

Medical Devices

Validation, calibration, risk management, post-market surveillance

ISO 13485, ISO 14971 risk management, 21 CFR 820, design history files. Verification and validation built into the lifecycle.

Aviation

Certification, standards, testing, maintenance, operations

FAA / EASA / CASA airworthiness, type certification, mandatory incident reporting, mature CAPA discipline. Passenger fatalities at ~10⁻⁹ per flight-hour.

Bridges

Engineering standards, load testing, inspection, safety factors

AS 5100, Eurocode, AASHTO. Safety factors, load testing, periodic inspection regimes, structural health monitoring. Failures investigated systematically.

Spaceflight

System engineering, failure analysis, redundancy, mission assurance

NASA-STD-8709, FMEA, redundancy at system level, formal mission assurance reviews. Loss-of-mission and loss-of-crew probabilities explicitly budgeted.

EVIDENCE QUALITY GATE

Climate claims should meet the same discipline before driving policy.

Hypothesis

What is being proposed?

A claim is the start of an audit, not its conclusion. The audit asks: which specific claim is being made, with which scope, and against which evidence base?

Mechanism

How could it happen?

A claim without a mechanism is correlation. The audit asks for the causal pathway and tests whether it is consistent with established physics, chemistry, and biology.

Measurement

What observations support it?

Direct measurement, derived calculation, statistical inference, and model output have different evidentiary weights. The audit asks which is being relied on, where.

Calibration

How are instruments calibrated?

Measurement only counts if the instrument is traceable to a reference standard. The audit asks how the calibration chain runs, who maintains it, and how it's independently verified.

Uncertainty

What are the limits of confidence?

A point estimate without an uncertainty range is a guess in fancy clothes. The audit asks for explicit quantification, transparent assumptions, and appropriate methods.

Claim Boundary

What can be claimed — and what cannot?

Every claim has a scope. The audit names what the evidence supports, what it does not support, and where the line falls. Most overreach lives at the unaudited edge.

Policy Reliance

What decisions are justified by the evidence?

The framework's signature question. The evidence licenses a reliance class — concern, planning, decision-grade. Different classes justify different policy actions. Audit which class the evidence has actually earned.

The three thinking hats

Use the three thinking hats:

Science·Audit·Policy