My specialty is in impacts assessment (oceans, coasts, fisheries, polar regions), but now I have published also on the science of climate change. To determine impacts correctly, one must understand the nature of change and its likelihood to continue. It is necessary to have trust in what the climate scientists tell you is going to happen in the future. In the IPCC structure, the science has been led by the UK and US scientists, and they have used modeling as their primary tool and with CO2 as the primary driver of temperature with some paleoclimate analysis coming later. The Impact Assessments have been led by the Russians, who have had an intense distrust of modeling. They viewed paleoclimatology as the most valid tool: if you want to know what will happen when CO2 rises or the temperature changes, they say we must look at the history of the earth. As an American, working with the Russian teams, I was often caught in the middle of both camps. I learned to listen to both views, and continue to do so. In particular, we learned to distrust any science literature or impacts assessment that did not consider all data available, whether modeling, the instrumented record back into the 1800s and/or the paleo and historical temperature reconstructions. If the data are truncated, such as starting the data set in the 1800s, without correcting for the Little Ice Age, there is likely an agenda. Many of us have learned, either formally, or informally, how to detect misrepresentation by statistical treatments and graphics. We learned to see if a suitable number of experts were present from the geological and paleo and solar physics realms to balance the CO2 modelers. As ClimateGate showed, these “Skeptics” were thoroughly disinvited and journals that would publish their papers would be boycotted by the CO2 modelers. Eventually, over 30+ years, a “consensus group” of scientists emerged after all non-believers were expunged. Nevertheless, they continue to persist, increasingly publishing dissenting papers.
The probability of warming may be greater, but cooling’s mass starvation begs us to plan for both – Dr. John T. Everett.