Your lament about climate science not advancing in 40 years reminds me of the book "The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age" by John Horgan (https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/1520-0469%281971%29028%3C1074%3AOTEOAI%3E2.0.CO%3B2 ). You would probably enjoy that book - I suspect that you are thinking along the same lines! Even so, it's hard to declare the "end" of science when there are whole new scientific disciplines now, such as proteomics, that didn't even exist 20 years ago.

Moreover, as Ilan Kelman shows above, there have indeed been many advances in climate science over the past 40 years.

It is worth distinguishing between scientific "consensus" and scientific "advances". Consensus can often lag the actual advance by a generation or so (re. Galileo, or even quantum theory). In basic climate science, I think you are correct that most of the main "advances" were made by 40 years ago. The "answer" to the question of how the climate will behave in the future hasn't really changed in any of the IPCC reports over all that time. All that has really changed are that the "uncertainties" have been reduced, or the "error bounds" narrowed. You might wonder what is even the point of repeating the whole thing again in IPCC 6.

However (as suggested by Ilan Kelman), don't dismiss those reductions in uncertainty as trivial. For one thing, such work often opens up whole new scientific landscapes to explore. Moreover, all that work provides scientific ballast that stabilizes earlier results, by showing extra detail, filling in gaps, and helping to resolve any remaining controversies. Over time, this is the kind of work that generates "consensus". If consensus in climate science remains elusive, it is mostly because the whole topic is politically fraught, and as Upton Sinclair said, it is very difficult to get a man to believe something when his salary depends on his not believing it.

Hi Enda.

The one famous scientific consensus in history was the belief that the Earth was the center of the universe. That was the prevailing consensus 500 years ago.

I mean with no development in Earth sciences, I needed 9 years for publication of my article:Helioclimatology of Japan.on basis of observation-100 years temperature time series.

As reasons of reject of my study, I was told that it is very short period of observation,although scientific journal are full of articles with 3,5...10 years of obesrvations and on this basis, prediction for next 30 years increase of global temperature on 3...5 C°, sea level rise on 1...3 m.