Jason Smerdon is coauthor of the newly revised Climate Change: The Science of Global Warming and Our Energy Future. The book is a succinct, non-ideological reference for anyone who wants to understand what we know (and don’t) about climate, from the basic workings of the atmosphere, oceans and solid earth through the long-term history of planetary climate, the human influence on it, and modern energy production and its implications. The book’s first edition, published in 2009, was by Edmond Mathez of the American Museum of Natural History (Smerdon wrote the student companion to that edition). The new edition, with Smerdon as coauthor, is vastly expanded and updated. Smerdon is a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and co-director of the Earth Institute’s Undergraduate Program in Sustainable Development. We spoke with him by email about where climate, and climate science, are going.