Customer Reviews

Climate Change: A Multidisciplinary Approach

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After reading some other text introducing the general topic of climate change, the next step should be this book. Burroughs does an excellent job of introducing the intermediate level to the concerned citizen. It is an unbiased account of the state of knowledge and covers a broad spectrum of climate change from statistical interpretation to continental drift. This is not a book for people that want to confirm alarmist or denialist positions, but a methodical (sometimes dry) walkthrough of the topic of climate change that require at least fundamental knowledge of natural science. Be prepared to do your homework though.

Many professional scientists need to rapidly access key information on specific aspects of a new domain of science they are vaguely familiar with. For me climate change falls in this category. I came across some very positive comments on this book and decided to make it my first introduction to the topic. I was particularly interested in measurements of climate change and broad descriptions of associated mathematics to guide me on planning the first steps on some work in that domain. I found chapters 4 and 5 particularly useful for that purpose. They provide appropriate qualitative descriptions of what I may need to look for in scientific papers to get me started on the development of some local empirical models. I found general discussions on the ENSO and other climatologic measurements of interactions between oceans and atmosphere pitched just at the right level. I will have no hesitation to recommend this text.

It's a very good synoptic overwiev of almost all aspects regrding this complex and actual argument. It's a very good link between too mathematical reading of many scientific papers and oversimplified divulgative texts.

Some notes:

there is a print error on page 176;

a syntesis with a diagram dealing of the global cyclic phenomena could help the reader to understand the magnitude of periods (or frequencies) interesting periodic or quasi-periodic events;

it would be more useful a trace on spectra and filtering, instead of the definition of variance;

maybe, a short paragraph on solutions of CO2 in the oceans would be interesting.

Other aspects which would be linkable to all of these could be, for instance, the immission of water vapour in the troposphere due to combustion, and if changes in Earth's angular momentum due to fuel extraction can lead to any change in climate stability.

There are parts of this book that make tough going for those of us whose career in the hard sciences ended with AP Chem II in high school, but give yourself time, read it over, and you'll get a handle on it. This is a good book for people who want to understand the basic sciences of weather and climate.