Quote Originally Posted by SadisticNature View Post
Climatology is basically a renaming of what used to be Atmospheric Physics, a field that has reputable journals that have been publishing since at least the 1970's.
Climatologists created their own journal: Climatic Change and it came out in 1977. But unlike many new journals, this one did not in fact launch itself as the flagship of a new discipline. Its explicit policy was to publish papers that were mainly interdisciplinary, such as explorations of the consequences that global warming might have on ecosystems. Most scientific papers on climate change itself continued to be published in journals dedicated to a specific field, like the meteorologists' Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences or the paleontologists' Quaternary Research.

On the whole, climate science remained "a scientific backwater," as one of its leading figures recalled decades later. "There is little question," he claimed, "that the best science students traditionally went into physics, math and, more recently, computer science." (Richard Lindzen, Testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, May 2, 2001, available as appendix to United States Congress (107:1) (2001)) The study of climate was not a field where you could win a Nobel Prize or a million-dollar patent. You were not likely to win great public fame, nor great respect from scientists in fields where discoveries were more fundamental and more certain. In the mid 1970s, it would have been hard to find a hundred scientists with high ability and consistent dedication to solving the puzzles of climate change. Now as before, many of the most important new findings on climate come from people whose main work lay in other fields, from air pollution to space science, as temporary detours from their main concerns.