The Warming Papers: The Scientific Foundation for the Climate Change Forecast

by David Archer (Editor), Raymond T. Pierrehumbert (Editor)

Chosen for the 2011 ASLI Choice - Honorable Mention (History Category) for a compendium of the key scientific papers that undergird the global warming forecast. 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.

Genres: Science, Environment, Climate Change

432 pages, Paperback

First published December 24, 2010

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

David Edward Archer is a computational ocean chemist, and has been a professor at the Geophysical Sciences department at the University of Chicago since 1993

Reviews

[Louis C Smith]

All the original work on climate change
Unambiguous except for those cultivate their ignorance.

[Thomas Ray]

QC912.3 .W37 2011 AOSS Library