Why read A Vast Machine?

Book cover of A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming

Book description

The science behind global warming, and its history: how scientists learned to understand the atmosphere, to measure it, to trace its past, and to model its future.

Global warming skeptics often fall back on the argument that the scientific case for global warming is all model predictions, nothing but simulation;…

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Why read it?

1 author picked A Vast Machine as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Steve M. Easterbrook

Author

This was the first (and still the best) book I ever read on how scientists collect and use the data for forecasting the weather and predicting climate change. I am particularly impressed with its scope–it starts with early attempts by 17th and 18th-century scientists to agree on how to measure things like wind and rainfall and ends with today’s world of satellites and computer models.

The book really brings alive the work of a massive network of scientists around the world collecting and analyzing observations about planet Earth.

From Steve's list on how scientists discovered global warming threat.