There's continuing disagreement inside and outside the scientific community about not only what scientists should say about climate change, but how they should be saying it. The communications literature states there is not one right approach, but a range of different approaches which may be suitable depending on the audience.

The climate blogosphere got in a tizzy in January about an advance copy of the text of a talk to be presented by Kevin Trenberth at the recent American Meteorological Society. The debate centered around Trenberth's idea that certainty about climate change is so great we should invert the common "Is this event caused by climate change?" line of questioning. As it states in the abstract, "Given that global warming is unequivocal, the null hypothesis should be that all weather events are affected by global warming".

All the talks from the "Communicating Climate Change" session (One and Two) at AMS were recorded and are now available for viewing online.  Trenberth's talk and my own presentation "Making the climate a part of the human world" provide examples of two very different ways of thinking about communication of climate change (viewers be patient, the audio of my talk doesn't kick in for about 90 seconds). You might say the different methods of analysis - I take a deep historical perspective to explain the confusion of today - lead also to clear differences in what I can best describe as temperament. A simple breakdown would be that Trenberth goes on the offensive (i.e. prove me wrong) while I've been told my approach could almost goes on the defensive (i.e. let's be more humble, there's a good reason the science is hard to believe). Obviously, I'm partial to the latter, it is my research after all. I do accept that there may also be a time and a place for the former too.