David studied Mathematics at Queens' College, Cambridge and was awarded an M.A. in 1971. Most of his career has been in the seismic processing industry servicing oil and gas companies. He worked both in research developing new techniques and as a manager.

A program he designed to recover seismic data from old images was particularly successful and formed the basis of his own company for 20 years before retiring. Since then, he has taken a keen interest in building a database of climate-related information in order to derive empirical evidence to explain observed climate changes, unbiased by conventional groupthink.