Perhaps the most contentious area that scientists get involved in in public is global warming. Debates often get rather adversarial. On the one hand you might have the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On the other perhaps The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).  The 4th report of the IPCC states “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.” GWPF is highly sceptical that warming is occurring.

Ultimately, you have to trust someone. The Earth’s climate is a ferociously complicated system and I don’t understand it at all, and I’m a scientist. I have even worked on one of (very very many) processes that are part of our climate, namely how rain droplets and snowflakes start to form. You cannot check the amazingly complex models that underly our understanding of our climate. You have no choice but to trust someone, but who.

Let us compare the IPCC and GWPF scientists. Here is the list of the 640 scientists who worked on the physical science bit of the 2007 IPCC report. I picked one at random: Michael Eby from the University of Victoria in Canada. Unsurprisingly, Michael Eby is a climate scientist. By the look of his CV, he works on modelling aspects of Earth’s climate. This is his full time job. So he has clearly spent many many hours over many years trying to understand our climate.

Here is the list of academic advisors of GWPF. Five of them are not scientists at all, they are economists. Economists can’t even predict the future behaviour of economies, why anyone would expect economists to be able to predict the future of our climate is completely beyond me.

If you go further down the list there are scientists, even a geophysicist, Vincent Courtillot. But his specialty appears to be paleomagnetism. This is the study of Earth’s magnetic field in the past, using rocks. There is nothing wrong with that but I struggle to see how that qualifies someone to comment on highly technical matters to do with CO2 in the atmosphere. Another member, David Whitehouse is described as having a “doctorate in astrophysics”. Great. But I have a doctorate in chemistry, and it even won a prize! This does not mean I know about climate change.

If you want to know who about climate change then you should ask a true climate scientist, someone who studies our climate 5 (or even 7) days a week, for year after year.