Customer Reviews

Global Warming

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This is a really super book. Much of it may be too involved for non-scientist readers, though there is plenty of material that just about anyone can read profitably. Probably best suited for an introductory graduate course, or senior level course, for earth science students. Has much better coverage of global biogeochemical processes than most climate books. I would combine with Peixoto & Oort or Hartmann's books, which are complementary.

I am a physical oceanographer, but not a climate specialist.

As a physicist who has an interest in climate science, I found this book very valuable in helping to give me some basic background. Harvey's approach to the topic is quite physically-based, so I think other physical scientists looking to learn more about the basic science would enjoy this book.

One particular standout was a simple calculation showing how the effect on surface temperature due to the reduction in outgoing emission to space from increased greenhouse gases is more than an order of magnitude larger than the effect due to increasing the radiative flux from the atmosphere to the earth's surface by the same amount. Another was the discussion of the carbon cycle and how to understand the large fluxes back and forth between the atmosphere, biosphere, and ocean mixed layer relative to the flux due to our addition of additional carbon from burning fossil fuels into this tightly-coupled system.