I see several things about the climate science that can be substantially improved.
* general discourse. Whenever someone raises some objection, the response is not a thoughtful argument, but many times a quick dismissal. you are certainly not one to do that, it is much appreciated
* unfalsifiability. scientific theories should be falsifiable. anything else is religion or politics. For example, what happens if there is a large volcano, or something like Saddam burning thousands of oil wells in Kuwait. I read somewhere that some climate models did check their predictions against the actual outcomes, and this is good. More evidence of this type would be great.
* model and data validation, audit and oversight. I am a quant working with both data and models in finance. I know about model uncertainty, and how messy is real world data. The regulators demand a lot of model testing, documentation, validation, ongoing monitoring, and audit. Our bible is the supervisory letter SR 11-7. Banks are investing billions in this and regulators hired hundreds of people to beef up their oversight. I don't see a similar scrutiny over the climate models that arguably are more important for the humanity
* all results in climate science can be spun to align to the climate change thesis. If there is a large uncertainty about the results, one picks the worse outcome and the result is presented as "new research show that the [melting of Antarctica, let's say] may be happening much faster than previously thought". Well, the same research show that the X thing may be also happening much slower, but who cares about that? If something completely new comes up (e.g. number of trees in the Amazon basin being off by a factor of 10), then more funding is needed.
* the 97% or so consensus of the climate scientists. My perception is that most of them know their own piece, and they are scrupulous, but can't conclude from their area of research one way or another about the whole global warming. They don't contradict it either, so if asked they say that global warming is most likely real. But that's not really a strong consensus, it's a polite agreement to not disagree. Here's a recent example on Hacker News: and antarctic ice researcher did an AMA on HN when his research regarding some Larsen C breakage made waves in the media [1]. The media spin was obviously that the world is getting warmer, and this is new evidence to support that. When someone on HN asked what we can do to stop further ice breaks, his answer was this: "Nothing! This is a completely natural process - ice builds up over time in the shelf and it has to be lost somehow. The calving of the iceberg is, in itself, not a result of human activity. If you mean more broadly how can we help prevent the loss of ice from Antarctica, then I'm not a climate policy expert". This gentleman is clearly a climate scientist, but he does not consider himself a "climate policy expert"
* Freeman Dyson [2] judges the climate models as having too much uncertainty: "The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world we live in ..."
By the way, I'm not a shill of the oil/coal/car industry. I do have a STEM PhD from MIT, and I can continue with more scientific arguments, but this message is getting already too long. I'm using a throwaway account.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13365211
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson#Climate_change