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I just got back from a week in the White-Inyo range and have a good observation on this. If the British Association for the Advancement of Science had been around during the Mid Holocene thermal maximum (6-7 thousand years ago, up to 2 degrees warmer) I'm sure they'd have issued a press release lamenting the imminent demise of the Bristlecone Pines.

Unfortunatly the Bristlecone Pines don't play by hysterical interest group rules, and by their ancient dead hulls one can see that during the climatic maximum they adapted and expanded their range in altitude upward to approximately 12,600 feet (currently they max out at approximately 11,400 feet). Now, if a couple of degrees up or down in temperature DIDN'T kill off a species with an incredibly narrow spacial range and a glacial rate of reproduction I'm not really buying that the same "potential" change is going to wreak wholesale slaughter on a bunch of much faster reproducing marine invertibrates that have orders of magnitude greater range.

Remember also that most of those critters close relatives managed to survive the Cretaceous\Triassic and monster Permian\Triassic extinctions. They, or their kith and kin, will be around for a looonnnggg time...

As for "the experts" knowing what they're doing, on an interesting aside an "expert" went out to cut down a Bristlecone for study and accidentally cut down a living tree that turned out to be about 250 years older than the 4,767 year old Methuselah tree...