Engineering is an area which academics least well understand. This is largely because in the UK & US there is a cultural dislike by public-sector Universities of all things industrial, commercial, but worst of all … a group who are actually better than academics at understanding many subjects.
Global warming is one of these (hence the hatred directed at us). Academics just can’t fathom how we “engineers” just look at the data and can take all their hard work and just say “rubbish”. And even worse, they hate it most of all when with our down to earth approach we make better forecasts than they (and boy do they hate it!).
Here are a few reasons for the difference:

• The world’s climate is a complex system that cannot be modelled in any meaningful way, so it falls outside the type of systems which academics are taught to work with.
• Engineers have a wealth of experience with similarly complex systems – where far from more and more complex analysis being better, often simple is best, So we have a wealth of experience developing and using “rules of thumb” that work, which just don’t find the academic ethos.
• Academics are arrogant because they believe their “superior” knowledge means they know more. In contrast engineers have been beaten into humility by our experience of the real world. (Although – now academics are finding out what it’s like to be a novice engineer faced with their first crisis as the real life system doesn’t work  as the textbooks say they ought.
• Engineers are focussed on decision making, we learn a wealth of techniques to make highly complex decisions involving a huge raft of areas: science, sociology, finance. Such as can a safe, reliable & “pretty” bridge be built for X million?
• Academics have no training in decision making in issues where knowledge is lacking. The are excessively focussed on one area of knowledge and so can’t see the big picture or use knowledge from outside their own speciality. But worst of all they are only trained to look at what they can make sense of … and if they can’t make sense of it … then they have no tools or techniques to work with … in other words … they have not a clue what to do.

I’ve often compared engineers to doctors. We both deal with hugely complex systems – which cannot be cut apart to work out what is actually going on. We both have limited means (time, money) and we both have deal with real people, etc.
But the main similarity is that both doctors and engineers have to view their subjects “holistically” — or perhaps “whole-istically”. There are a million and one reasons why machinery can go “wrong” from poor maintenance, to the wrong fuel, to “driver stupidity”. Likewise, a doctor has to be aware that many similar problems can cause the same symptoms. And the really big difference between doctors/engineers and academics is the human factor. Because unlike academics who can e.g. just say “well it’s just a stupid operator”, an engineer has to view the people who use machinery as part of the issue. Not only that, but the legal aspects, the commercial aspects. Likewise the doctor has to treat the patient not the body.
The result is that academics seem to be clueless about the human factor (hence the regular “conspiracy ideation” rhetoric. What this is really saying is: “you are blaming the human factor for things going wrong – we academics believe humans are all wonderful people who never make mistakes or fake measurements to take an early lunch break).
So, e.g. when academics publish a “global temperature”. They see this as a pure academic exercise amounting to little more than finding a way to weight the readings so as to show their “global warming”. They don’t e.g. make any attempt to verify the thermometers are accurate (unless they show a long term drop in temperature – when they seem to be removed without further assessment), they don’t quality check the data, they have almost no concern how anyone uses their data and they really couldn’t care less if the economy goes to rack and ruin and even millions die because their data is substandard.
But in the real world – the one where real people buy and sell real things – where real people struggle for money for health care, jobs, family, education. People expect things not only to work, but to work reliably. And real people have standards and so feel that if someone in an advert e.g. tells them a fact, that that fact has to be true – not because the advertiser says it is, but because they have data to back it up.
But academics don’t even work to the lowest standard of cheap advertisers. They refuse to publish the data proving their assertions in a way that no one else in society would be allowed to do. They refuse to have their work audited by outside people. The result is that we have people who can’t use excel compiling global temperature figures – from sensors that I will guarantee they have not checked themselves are fit for the purpose they intend.
And this is why engineers get so angry with the dumb stupid academics who fumble around with their figures and their models apparently blind to the real economic and social harm being caused by their appalling work which would shame a back street junk yard.

Climate Engineering

So, what I believe we now need is a professional group of “climate engineers”. Not “engineering” in the sense used by academics as people whose job it is to change the climate, but instead a professional group who look at the climate in the way engineers look at all problems: whole-istically – with a view to the real costs both socially and economically. With a view to making good quality decisions – not just stuffing out poor qualilty data and then ranting on some blog.
What we need is a group with the professional ethics and quality standards to ensure measurements are fit for purpose, but above all, a group who has the experience dealing with other complex systems to help policy makers make financially, economically, socially, environmentally, scientifically, sensible decisions.