The Current Status of Climate Science

How much do we really know about the hundreds of different factors that function to change our planet’s climate?

On a radio interview I caught the other day (sorry, can’t recall which show), the speaker explained that climate science today is where our understanding of our solar system, the galaxy, and the rest of the universe was in 1960 when the space program began. 

Obviously, climate science is improving every day, and it’s improving at a far faster rate than astronomy and astrophysics did 60 years ago, just as everything is advancing faster than ever before.  The point, however, is that we need to expect some incredible revelations, especially given the relation that climate has with water and food shortages, the threat to human health represented by disease-carrying insects, the health of the world’s largest ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica, and the exact rate at which CO2 and methane are being emitted into the atmosphere.