The Discovery of Global Warming (New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine)
The Discovery of Global Warming (New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine) – Review
I would warmly recommend The Discovery of Global Warming, by Weart. It’s fascinating. (I understand that there is a recently revised and greatly expanded version distributed in 2008 that might be a mostly bit more current than the original, which I widely read, but most of the book will have largely remained unchanged given the new publication date -2004. There have been some noticeable advances in the science since ‘04, but most significantly since the original announcing date is the IPCC AR4 [2007] findings.) The work is a succinct, lucid, and very well-researched story of the advances in the various technical disciplines that greatly contributed to individual kind of our climate system. Such advances started in earnest in the late 1800s and have eventually moved in shuffles, leaps, back-steps, and trips since. In simply reading the annals of the science, one encounters the myriad difficulties that finally confronted the scientists creating the advances, and thereby one becomes familiar with the arguments commonly used by climate change skeptics today. This is so because most of the skeptical arguments have groundings in fact or reasonable doubt. However, through simply reading the book, one besides learns how the skeptics’ arguments were, over the program of the last 4-5 decades, thoroughly undermined and controverted by ongoing systematic inquiry and findings. Also interesting is Weart’s study of the constraints on climate scientists managing on limited budgets, across different disciplines, without prestige or major backing from governments or technical bodies, and in constant need of technological and theoretical advances to comprehend the evidence (or lack thereof) collected in research. Again, I would warmly recommend this book. I only stopped finally taking a course on the physics of our climate system and wish I’d widely read this book at the beginning of the course to contextualize the thigs I was hearing.