These early experiments were the overture to what would become the most monumental — and most frustrating — scientific undertaking ever: understanding, characterizing and modeling Earth’s climate system. The Quanta Podcast Climate science is the most significant scientific collaboration in history, and its lessons are a massive human achievement. “Climate science has always required, by its very nature, collaboration,” said Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria in Canada. Climate science is also driving new ideas and strategies to compensate for our self-inflicted wounds. Climate scientists have faced not only extreme working conditions, but also antagonistic political movements that reject their findings and attempt to defund their work entirely.