Thales (c. 620 – c. 530 BC): The Earth rests on water.
Aneximenes (c. 540 – c. 475 BC): Everything is made of air.
Heraclitus (c. 540 – c. 450 BC): All is fire.
Empodecles (c. 493 – c. 435 BC): There are four elements: earth, air, fire, and water.
Democritus (c. 460 – c. 370 BC): Atoms (basic elements of nature) come in an infinite variety of shapes and sizes.
Aristotle (384 – 322 BC): Heavy objects must fall faster than light ones. The universe is a series of crystalline spheres that carry the sun, moon, planets, and stars around Earth.
Ptolemey (90 – 168 AD): Ditto the Earth-centric universe, with a mathematical description.
Copernicus (1473 – 1543): The planets revolve around the sun in perfectly circular orbits.
Brahe (1546 – 1601): The planets revolve around the sun, but the sun and moon revolve around Earth.
Kepler (1573 – 1630): The planets revolve around the sun in elliptical orbits, and their trajectory is governed by magnetism.
Newton (1642 – 1727): The course of the planets around the sun is determined by gravity, which is a force that acts at a distance. Light consists of corpuscles; ordinary matter is made of larger corpuscles. Space and time are absolute and uniform.
Rutherford (1871 – 1937), Bohr (1885 – 1962), and others: The atom has a center (nucleus), which consists of two elemental particles, the neutron and proton.
Einstein (1879 – 1955): The universe is neither expanding nor shrinking.
That’s just a small fraction of the mistaken and incomplete theories that have held sway in the field of physics. There are many more such mistakes and lacunae in the other natural sciences: biology, chemistry, and earth science — each of which, like physics, has many branches. And in all branches there are many unresolved questions. For example, the Standard Model of particle physics, despite its complexity, is known to be incomplete. And it is thought (by some) to be unduly complex; that is, there may be a simpler underlying structure waiting to be discovered.
Given all of this, it is grossly presumptive to claim that climate science is “settled” when the phenomena that it encompasses are so varied, complex, often poorly understood, and often given short shrift (e.g., the effects of solar radiation on the intensity of cosmic radiation reaching Earth, which affects low-level cloud formation, which affects atmospheric temperature and precipitation).
Anyone who says that climate science is “settled” is either ignorant, stupid, or a freighted with a political agenda.
Politics and Prosperity 