Paper short abstract:

As a natural scientist working in policy fields relevant to climate change: e.g energy strategies, resilient systems and environmental impacts, the author invites social anthropologists to consider a potential major sociological bias in methodologies used to construct climate science knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

The author has worked as consultant ecologist in several climate-related policy fields - having advised government agencies (Countryside Agency, DTI) and major NGOs (National Trust) on future impacts of climate change, including the impact of mitigation strategies. In 2005, he published a controversial critique 'Chill: a reassessment of global warming theory' which challenged the climate modelling community on the absence of natural cycles in their projections. He has been consulted on these issues by major banking and investment houses and Chill was reviewed in the paleo-climate journal, The Holocene, as recommended reading to set beside the output of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That book ended with 'Reflections from Anthropology' - based upon the author's brief exposure to linguistic anthropology under Edwin Ardener at Oxford University's Institute of Social Anthropology. In that final chapter aspects of computer modelling of future climate change were challenged in that cycles and their irregular periods, a main field of paleo-climatology, had been left out. The predictive methodologies of virtual reality models required more precision than nature could provide. The author would like to outline this critique to professional anthropologists and suggests that future climate science would benefit from the attention of critical sociology.