Except that Chris Field is not 'a top climate scientist'. Rather, Chris Field is a professor of biological sciences. So how much confidence can one have in his pronouncements and predictions about future climate changes?
Field said "the actual trajectory of climate change is more serious" than any of the climate predictions in the IPCC's fourth assessment report called "Climate Change 2007."
Translated into plain English, that means, "the climate predictions in the IPCC's fourth assessment report were wrong". Yet rather than putting that fact into the headline, Reuters runs with the alarmist headline of "Global warming seen worse than predicted".
Those Reuters "journalists" must have been educated way beyond their native abilities. Otherwise, how could they have misunderstood something so important that is staring them in right the face, huh...
Chris Field sits at the foot of Owl Gore.
Stanford Report, October 12, 2007
Stanford researchers who worked with Nobel-winning climate-change panel join Al Gore at press conference
When Al Gore met the press Friday morning in Palo Alto, four Stanford researchers stood by his side: Stephen Schneider, Terry Root, Chris Field and Thomas Heller.
Chris Field, professor of biological sciences and director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford.
I’m just glad Obama is in office. Because he may have to lower the sea levels.
Field apparently is a scientist who publishes alarmist papers on the biological effects of climate change. So that makes him, for Reuters, a top climate scientist, even if he couldn't rank the altitudes of the thermosphere, ionosphere and mesosphere.
Campbell, J. E. and D. B. Lobell. R. C. Genova, C. B. Field. 2008. The Global Potential of Bioenergy on Abandoned Agriculture Lands. Environmental Science and Technology 42:5791–5794.
Field, C. B., J. E. Campbell, and D. B. Lobell. 2008. Biomass energy: the scale of the potential resource. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 23:65-72.
Houlton, B.Z., Y-P. Wang, P.M. Vitousek, and C.B. Field. 2008. A unifying framework for dinitrogen fixation in the terretrial biosphere. Nature (Letters), doi:10.1038/nature07028.
Lobell, D. B. and C. B. Field. 2008. Estimation of the carbon dioxide (CO2) fertilization effect using growth rate anomalies of CO2 and crop yields since 1961. Global Change Biology 14:39-45.
Nicholas Cahill, K. and C. B. Field. 2008. Future of the wine industry: Climate change science. Practical Winery and Vineyard 29(6):16-33.