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The Warming Papers: The Scientific Foundation for the Climate Change Forecast 1st Edition
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Global warming is arguably the defining scientific issue of modern times, but it is not widely appreciated that the foundations of our understanding were laid almost two centuries ago with the postulation of a greenhouse effect by Fourier in 1827. The sensitivity of climate to changes in atmospheric CO2 was first estimated about one century ago, and the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration was discovered half a century ago. The fundamentals of the science underlying the forecast for human-induced climate change were being published and debated long before the issue rose to public prominence in the last few decades.
The Warming Papers is a compendium of the classic scientific papers that constitute the foundation of the global warming forecast. The paper trail ranges from Fourier and Arrhenius in the 19th Century to Manabe and Hansen in modern times. Archer and Pierrehumbert provide introductions and commentary which places the papers in their context and provide students with tools to develop and extend their understanding of the subject.
The book captures the excitement and the uncertainty that always exist at the cutting edge of research, and is invaluable reading for students of climate science, scientists, historians of science, and others interested in climate change.
- ISBN-109781405196161
- ISBN-13978-1405196161
- Edition1st
- PublisherWiley-Blackwell
- Publication dateJanuary 18, 2011
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions8.5 x 1.02 x 10.62 inches
- Print length432 pages
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"A hefty new volume published by Wiley-Blackwell and edited by the climate scientists David Archer and Raymond Pierrehumbert at the University of Chicago, it's a rich feast for anyone who wants to trace the history of climate science from its earliest origins to the present." (The New York Times, February 2011)
From the Inside Flap
The Warming Papers is a compendium of the classic scientific papers that constitute the foundation of the global warming forecast. The paper trail ranges from Fourier and Arrhenius in the 19th Century to Manabe and Hansen in modern times. Archer and Pierrehumbert provide introductions and commentary which places the papers in their context and provide students with tools to develop and extend their understanding of the subject.
The book capture the excitement and the uncertainty that always exist at the cutting edge of research, and is invaluable reading for students of climate science, scientists, historians of science, and others interested in climate change.
From the Back Cover
The Warming Papers is a compendium of the classic scientific papers that constitute the foundation of the global warming forecast. The paper trail ranges from Fourier and Arrhenius in the 19th Century to Manabe and Hansen in modern times. Archer and Pierrehumbert provide introductions and commentary which places the papers in their context and provide students with tools to develop and extend their understanding of the subject.
The book capture the excitement and the uncertainty that always exist at the cutting edge of research, and is invaluable reading for students of climate science, scientists, historians of science, and others interested in climate change.
About the Author
Ray Pierrehumbert is the Louis Block Professor in Geophysical Sciences, a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and was named Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes Academiques by the Republic of France. Pierrehumbert studies the physics of climate, especially regarding the long-term evolution of the climates of Earth, Mars.Venus, Titan and extrasolar planets. Pierrehumbert was an author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Third Assessment Report (1997-2001), and a member of the National Research Council's Panel on Abrupt Climate Change and its Societal Impacts (2000-2001), and is currently serving on the National Research Council Board on Atmospheric Science and Climate, and the National Research Council Panel on CO2 Stabilization Targets.
Product details
- ASIN : 1405196165
- Publisher : Wiley-Blackwell; 1st edition (January 18, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 432 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9781405196161
- ISBN-13 : 978-1405196161
- Item Weight : 2.3 pounds
- Dimensions : 8.5 x 1.02 x 10.62 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,419,455 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,473 in Rivers in Earth Science
- #1,521 in Weather (Books)
- #2,483 in Climatology
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About the author

David Archer is a computational ocean chemist, and has been a Professor at the Department of The Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago since 1993. He has published research on the carbon cycle of the ocean and the sea floor. He has worked on the history of atmospheric CO2 concentration, the fate of fossil fuel CO2 over geologic time scales in the future, and the impact of CO2 on future ice age cycles, ocean methane hydrate decomposition, and coral reefs.
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I was enthused recently when "The Warming Papers" came to my attention.
A hefty new volume published by Wiley-Blackwell and edited by the climate scientists David Archer and Raymond Pierrehumbert at the University of Chicago, it's a rich feast for anyone who wants to trace the history of climate science from its earliest origins to the present.
(Note that it's a pricey book, north of $60 in paperback and closer to $150 in hardback -- so perhaps it won't be an impulse purchase for many people. But I suspect well-stocked libraries will have it, and even if yours doesn't, you should be able to get a copy through interlibrary loan. And the book might work for college classes in climate science; by textbook standards, $60 is a steal.)
The idea of the book is to present the touchstone scientific papers in the field, all of which have in some way stood the test of time, even if not in all their details. The book begins, for instance, by reprinting the 1827 paper "On the Temperatures of the Terrestrial Sphere and Interplanetary Space," in which Joseph Fourier discovered the phenomenon we now call the greenhouse effect.
It includes an 1861 paper in which John Tyndall measured, with considerable precision, the heat-trapping powers of water vapor, carbon dioxide and other trace gases in the atmosphere, and speculated that changing the concentration of some gases might alter the Earth's climate.
And most delightfully, the editors included the 1896 paper [...]in which a Swedish scientist, Svante Arrhenius, spelled out the implications of an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Arrhenius did the hard mathematics to predict what might happen to the temperature of the planet if the carbon dioxide level doubled.
Although he made some errors, he came up with a number, 11 degrees Fahrenheit, that is in the same range as modern forecasts, albeit at the high end of most of them. The editors write, "In Arrhenius' 1896 paper we witness the birth of modern climate science."
"The Warming Papers" goes on to reprint many of the seminal modern papers on climate change, including reports from Charles David Keeling about his pioneering measurements of carbon dioxide. It includes papers from the 1960s and 1970s in which Syukuro Manabe and his colleagues at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton worked out the mathematics needed to build computerized models of the atmosphere. Those have become fundamental tools of the science.
Dr. Pierrehumbert pointed out to me in an e-mail that reading the older papers should dispel for anyone the oft-heard claim "that climate science is `in its infancy' " -- it has, in reality, been making predictions since the 19th century, and we are now living in an era when those predictions are coming true.
"It's exciting to read original scientific papers, to follow along as people struggle with figuring things out," Dr. Archer told me in an e-mail. "For the climate-change question, there is another point to be made, about how deep the roots of the ideas go, how far back in time. The forecast for global warming predates the actual anomalous warming by many decades."
I came to this book after four years of learning about fossil fuel climate deception as well as US Government climate deception. I created web sites to alert people to this deception. I needed more facts than found on YouTube and elsewhere online. NASA helped, but I needed content, and the Warming Papers gives me a lot of original content to make my case against climate deniers and climate deception personalities.
I now have YouTube channels. These channels and my web sites I advertise on my vehicles and t-shirts. Spencer Wheart's The Discovery of Global Warming gave me a lot of information; I grew to want more, and Archer's books lead to new insights and understanding. This morning I read Fourier's translated comments and could not contain myself.
Fourier wrote on the influence of solar radiation on Earth as early as 1808 in matters related to subsurface temperature variations; he wrote, as many of us know now, that CO2 acted as a greenhouse gas in his 1824 paper. He wrote about so much that we would find expanded upon by Croll and Malankovich. There's so much here that anyone with interest in the history of climate science, how it came to us will find this book belongs close at hand.
I'm using the Kindle edition and will buy a paperback edition once I find some more work.
Top reviews from other countries
This book satisfies some of the itch engendered by reading such as Richard Alley's 'The Two Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future', David Archer's 'The Long Thaw' and 'Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast', Wally Broecker's 'The Great Ocean Conveyor' and 'Climate Change: A Multidisciplinary Approach' by William James Burroughs.
Burroughs book title hints at the complexity of the subject and also the difficulties scientists have in quickly dismissing the cherry picked factoids and sound byte length quotes of the deniers whilst engaged with such on mainstream media channels. A good primer on Oceanography would be a useful addition for the interested layman such a one is that by Tom Garrison, 'Oceanography: An Invitation to Marine Science' and for a well presented history of the geological and biological evolution of the Earth, 'Cassell's Atlas of Evolution: The Earth, its Landscape, and Life Forms' will go down well with all ages.
What The Warming Papers does is provide useful information for those with an open enough mind wishing to continue to explore the scientific underpinning of the current state of knowledge at greater depth than the titles mentioned above. You will then be armed with some of the knowledge required to counter the arguments of those indicated in the first paragraph above.
My only reservation is that there are not that many recent papers published in this book (hence only four stars) but the one on Greenland ice melt is very welcome.
I endorse the recommendation of another reviewer to find a copy of 'The Rough Guide to Climate Change', therein will be found website urls to other useful and most importantly reliable sources.
Each paper gets an introduction, on some largely explaining things to be aware of (like features of the translation or explanations of obsolete terms) but also concerning itself with the outline of the article and its impact, this is helpful if you're not sure why the piece you're reading is significant. The choice of papers means a range of topics are covered from Referencing seems good, the index is a little short but the contents makes it easy to move round the book and the text is well printed on a decent, waxy feeling paper. It has the feel of a good textbook.
As a work concerned with the foundation of climate science, the past, it has the advantage that it can't easily go out of date so an interested reader is likely to be able to get some years of value from it, especially as the book is well printed in good quality paper. As to who may benefit from this book, realistically you would have to have some background in the subject to obtain the full benefit of this book so a student looking for a broader understanding of the topic or a very well read lay reader, but mostly I'd suggest it is a book for students and academics.
This collation of academic papers is divided into themed chapters that are introduced with quite readable but short introductions of between 2 and 4 pages. Reading those alone gave me a good grasp of how this subject has developed and the issues. Nevertheless, they do not total a book's worth of reading and few of the papers tempted me to dip in.
Some chapter headings suggest that the editors were aiming to introduce a little pizzazz to the subject (`Wagging the dog', `By the light of the silvery moon') but this flair is not sustained (`Ocean Heat Uptake and Committed Warming').
For the student who does not want to make the effort to research abstracts and the subject themselves, the book hands the subject to them on a plate. However, I suspect that the committed student would be able to compile and obtain the underlying papers from an afternoon in the library and probably extend their grasp of the territory along the way.
The publisher and/or editors have rewarded themselves well for collating and organising 32 scientific papers on the subject and writing brief linking forewords. Had the editors extended their commentaries a student might feel their efforts more deserving. Had they attempted to bridge the gap between academic work and the lay reader, the book might have offered broader appeal.
There's a vast amount of material to absorb and many areas that you will probably wish to skim through unless your education or profession requires you to be conversant in all the details. But the key result is that you are accessing the original publications on which the case for global warming is built rather than relying on some intermediary to digest & regurgitate on your behalf. If you like your science raw and undigested then this is for you.
It's aimed at students and scientists and as such requires a scientific background to understand much of the content. As an Environmental Science student, this book is like a goldmine of information to me, collating almost two hundred years worth of climate change research into one accessible volume. As a previous reviewer states, it may be disappointing to a non-scientist seeking a primer on the climate change debate. If this is what you're searching for I recommend `The Rough Guide to Climate Change' or `Global Warming: A Very Short Introduction..



