Brian H wrote:
Neither the “Consensus” nor “climatology” exist. There is no such degree; those claiming/inventing the title are dabbling in physics, mathematics, oceanography, hydrology, computer modelling, forecasting, and meteorology without qualifications in any of them. Those who do have such qualifications are contemptuous of their amateurish abuse of those specialties.

It seems to me the scientists have good qualifications of similar disciplines:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatologist
Just to check the top three in alphabet:
Dr Myles Allen graduated in Physics and Philosophy in 1987
Richard B. Alley (born 1957) is an American geologist and Evan Pugh Professor of Geoscience
Svante August Arrhenius (19 February 1859 – 2 October 1927) was a Swedish scientist, originally a physicist, but often referred to as a chemist, and one of the founders of the science of physical chemistry

Yes they have qualifications of neighboring disciplines because the original discipline did not exists at the time. Do you expect a climatologist to hold a PHD in ALL of the disciplines you mentioned? Btw Physics (nature philosophy) was once not a discipline either and some time ago Programmers were called Theoretical Physicists, but that did not stop them from doing science. We have only a few centuries of solid science in core disciplines and decades in secondaries. Give it some time and we will have Climatology PHD’s.

I would agree with you that when they working on a different discipline makes your skills less sharp in the original one, but that does not mean that any of scientists that do not currently work on the topic understand it more than a specialist spending his life work on it. Yes you could expect a mathematician to know if a physicist is right or wrong, because he understands more fundamentals, but I bet they don’t, otherwise there would be no need for other fields – we could train only mathematicians. This analogy should hold true for Physics and any other field that Climatology is base on.

Yes I heard about the criticism of Climate research by other disciplines (physicists or hydrologists) and usually the press responds to it with headlines “OMG WTF THERE IS NO CLIMATE CHANGE” where the original message was “OMG WTF A SMALL MISTAKE SOMEWHERE IN A METHOD OR CALCULATION”.