Climate science after ‘climate-gate’

Finally, the Encyclopaedia Britannica has published Climate  Change: an unbiased guide to the key issue of our age, which gives useful scientific background as well as summarising the conclusions reached in greater detail by the IPCC.

Clearly, the basic science of climate change is settled.

This is not to say that every fact about climate or weather is now explained by the theory. That would mean that the science was finished rather than settled. Nor is it to say that the science is certainly true.

Perhaps at some time in the future our current understanding of basic physical processes in the atmosphere, for example, will be overthrown by some new theory, as Einstein’s theory of motion overthrew Newton’s. But important though it is to acknowledge that science is fallible, this is true for all scientific theories rather than being a fact about climate science in particular. The fallibility of science does not stop us building bridges, or flying in aeroplanes, or taking therapeutic drugs. Neither should it stop us taking action to deal with the warming our current best understanding of the physics, chemistry and biology of the Earth and its atmosphere says is happening and will accelerate if we do not urgently move our economies to a low carbon future.