There's a problem in all of the climate predictions people have made over the last few years - we just don't know who to trust. Some experts remind us that since we can't predict the weather more than 10 days from now making economy-shattering policy decisions on such incomplete science is a bad idea. One prominent politician says he took a random sample of all the climate studies out there and that 928 out of 12,000 articles agreed with him, so he must be right. How are we to know?

Global warming is more politics than science and I don't want to get into whether it is happening or not, or how much, because that's not science, it's advocacy no matter what I say. The operative question is, how do we make it complete science?

This article from a national lab says climate models are accurate while another national lab says they've found a way to finally make climate models accurate.

Who's right? The worst person to ask may be a climate scientist.

Why so? We wouldn't go to a tobacco company employee to get objective information on cigarettes or an Exxon employee to get information on pollution so it doesn't seem to make sense to rely exclusively on researchers getting paid to investigate global warming.

The climate has varied a lot over millions of years, sometimes wildly. During the last 300 million years, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have swung back and forth from 250 parts per million, about what they are today, to more than 2,000 parts per million.

So if scientists take a 50 million year range and 500 data points in that time, where they pick them is not only important, it's absolutely essential to know which ones they picked and why.

Almost no one would take scientific data at face value without asking who was making the analysis and where they got funding yet it seems to happen with climate studies all of the time. A scientist accepting a grant from Union of Concerned Scientists may not be dishonest, any more than a scientist getting a grant from Exxon is dishonest, but neither of those corporations are funding work they dislike. Union of Concerned Scientists alone spends $12 million per year talking about the consensus on global warming. That's real money.

Conservative websites and individual science writers have plenty to say about the flaws in climate science but where do we go to get answers free of bias?

The answer is calibration. Unfortunately we can't do calibration for ancient periods but we can do it for modern times and, provided the researchers aren't tweaking the algorithm to match the data, it can show us if we are on the right path.

Computer scientists at Oak Ridge National Lab think they have a way to create an accurate model and it can be used for in estimates of water resources, hydrologic sciences, climate science and ecology.

They used extremes in real data from between 1940 and 2005 and combined them with numerical tools so they could determine how climate models fared when compared to actual observations.

“Once we understand the nature of these connections our hope is that we will be able to determine if there is a relation between two extreme weather events – like heat waves and droughts,” said Auroop Ganguly, a member of the ORNL Computational Sciences and Engineering Division. “We may then be able to determine whether there will be more intense storms, hurricanes or floods, and this information could perhaps be used as an early warning tool or to help develop policies.”

Let's hope so. Everyone agrees the environment is important. Everyone agrees we are warmer. The 'why' of that warmth is the question of the decade and objective, scientific answers to that question could be the most important research of this century.