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Waters of the World: the story of the scientists who unravelled the mysteries of our seas, glaciers, and atmosphere and made the planet whole
How is the climate where you are? And how did it get that way? How does the great complex global interaction of ice, ocean, and atmosphere combine to generate the rain that sustains us? And who figured all its secret processes out?
From the glaciers of the Alps to the towering cumulonimbus clouds of the Caribbean and the unexpectedly chaotic flows of the North Atlantic, Waters of the World is a tour through 150 years of the history of a significant but underappreciated idea: that the Earth has a global climate system made up of interconnected parts, constantly changing on all scales of both time and space. A prerequisite for the discovery of global warming and climate change, this idea was forged by scientists studying water in its myriad forms. This is their story.
Linking the history of the planet with the lives of those who studied it, Sarah Dry follows the remarkable scientists who ascended volcanic peaks to peer through an atmosphere’s worth of water vapour, cored mile-thick ice sheets to uncover the Earth’s ancient climate history, and flew inside storm clouds to understand how small changes in energy can produce both massive storms and the general circulation of the Earth’s atmosphere. Each toiled on his or her own corner of the planetary puzzle. Gradually, their cumulative discoveries coalesced into a unified working theory of our planet’s climate.
We now call this field climate science, and in recent years it has provoked great passions, anxieties, and warnings. But no less than the object of its study, the science of water and climate is — and always has been — evolving. By revealing the complexity of this history, Waters of the World delivers a better understanding of our planet’s climate at a time when we need it the most.
From the glaciers of the Alps to the towering cumulonimbus clouds of the Caribbean and the unexpectedly chaotic flows of the North Atlantic, Waters of the World is a tour through 150 years of the history of a significant but underappreciated idea: that the Earth has a global climate system made up of interconnected parts, constantly changing on all scales of both time and space. A prerequisite for the discovery of global warming and climate change, this idea was forged by scientists studying water in its myriad forms. This is their story.
Linking the history of the planet with the lives of those who studied it, Sarah Dry follows the remarkable scientists who ascended volcanic peaks to peer through an atmosphere’s worth of water vapour, cored mile-thick ice sheets to uncover the Earth’s ancient climate history, and flew inside storm clouds to understand how small changes in energy can produce both massive storms and the general circulation of the Earth’s atmosphere. Each toiled on his or her own corner of the planetary puzzle. Gradually, their cumulative discoveries coalesced into a unified working theory of our planet’s climate.
We now call this field climate science, and in recent years it has provoked great passions, anxieties, and warnings. But no less than the object of its study, the science of water and climate is — and always has been — evolving. By revealing the complexity of this history, Waters of the World delivers a better understanding of our planet’s climate at a time when we need it the most.
416 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2019
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January 11, 2020Nature's nice review, by science historian Ruth Morgan: https://www.nature.com/articles/d4158...
"The roots of climate science stretch back further than many suspect — long into the nineteenth century. Victorian physicist John Tyndall’s work on glaciers, for instance, helped to pave the way for twentieth-century science by the likes of meteorologist Joanne Simpson, oceanographer Henry Stommel and palaeoclimatologist Willi Dansgaard. In her remarkable Waters of the World, historian Sarah Dry brings to life this chain of researchers who helped to reveal the dynamics of Earth’s planetary systems and humanity’s growing impact on them. . . .
Waters of the World demonstrates how impoverished science might become if stripped of the stories of the people who shaped it. As we live through a climate crisis of our own making, the book reveals how researchers, over more than 150 years, defined and measured the processes that got us here — and gave us the knowledge we need to curb their worst impacts."
"The roots of climate science stretch back further than many suspect — long into the nineteenth century. Victorian physicist John Tyndall’s work on glaciers, for instance, helped to pave the way for twentieth-century science by the likes of meteorologist Joanne Simpson, oceanographer Henry Stommel and palaeoclimatologist Willi Dansgaard. In her remarkable Waters of the World, historian Sarah Dry brings to life this chain of researchers who helped to reveal the dynamics of Earth’s planetary systems and humanity’s growing impact on them. . . .
Waters of the World demonstrates how impoverished science might become if stripped of the stories of the people who shaped it. As we live through a climate crisis of our own making, the book reveals how researchers, over more than 150 years, defined and measured the processes that got us here — and gave us the knowledge we need to curb their worst impacts."
Read
June 29, 2020Waters of the World sparkles with lyricism and wit. Dry is a gifted storyteller, and her research into the pre-history of Earth system science has turned up gripping tales of risk, adventure, defiance, and discovery. A unique and important book.
Deborah R. Coen, author of Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale
An account of the two-hundred-year effort to understand the world’s climate system, Waters of the World is not only timely but also one of the most beautifully written books on science that I have seen in a long time. It is one thing to communicate this complex and important topic lucidly, but quite another to make the material seductive, poetic, enthralling. I was left wanting to read John Tyndall’s writings on ice, to hear the epic creak of Alpine glaciers, to go cloud-spotting off Tenerife and float turnips in Scottish lochs. Describing one of the most vital but least visible histories in modern science, and rescuing from neglect a host of pioneers who helped us to see how our planet works, it is a remarkable achievement.
Philip Ball, author of H20: A Biography of Water and the Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China
In this cleverly argued and brilliantly written history, Dry traces the interaction between the dramatic careers of six major figures in the history of climatology and the uneven and surprising emergence of a science of climate since the mid-nineteenth century. The book illuminates its history with tales of mountain climbing and dramatic voyages, of tell-tale ice cores and threatening hurricanes. No set of stories could be more urgent now and in need of the care and intelligence with which they are told here. In showing how the focus of these engaging and energetic scientists and their many colleagues gradually shifted from a collective search for the principles of a global climate system to visions of dynamic, interactive and unstable climates in change, this book has much to teach about the roots of the most reliable knowledge of climate and how it should be best understood in its full historical and cultural setting.
Simon Schaffer, Professor of the history and philosophy of science, University of Cambridge
Part history, part biography, part scientific tutorial, part philosophy, Dry humanises and personalises the science of climate change as it has evolved over time. By focusing on a wide selection of important contributors dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Tyndall, Smyth, Riehl, Malkus Simpson, Stommel, Dansgaard, and numerous others) the human story emerges from the science. She describes the fits and starts, the emotional elements, conceptual and observational difficulties, and the sheer fun these scientists had along the way as the understanding of climate emerged as a serious intellectual endeavour.
Carl Wunsch, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physical Oceanography, Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In compelling portraits of six scientists and their work, Dry probes the origins of what we now call climate science. She brings alive scientific mysteries about glaciers, clouds, oceans and the atmosphere to show how our present understanding of climate as a complex global system developed over the last 170 years. It’s a brilliant historical jigsaw puzzle, revealing how big questions about our planet have evolved and interlocked. But more than this, she makes a powerful argument about what it means to study the earth. Our knowledge of our planet, and our place on it, grew from concerns and assumptions that are as dynamic and full of change as the natural phenomena we study. How are we driven to ask the questions about nature that we do? Dry’s answers take us to the human heart of science. Exploring her subjects with unfailing insight, she brings each individual set of intellectual passions into focus. Stepping gracefully from Victorian England to late twentieth century Greenland, her biographies illuminate the combination of speculation, observation, calculation, and assumptions that have shaped science at different moments in the past. As she says, global visions come from individuals, particular places and moments in time. Such a profoundly human account of knowledge-building may be our best guide to thinking about the planet’s future.
Katharine Anderson, York University, author of Predicting the Weather
Waters of the World offers a far-reaching and wonderfully unique take on the history of climate science. Focusing on key scientists, some less known than others, the book illustrates vividly and through fine details how studies of different forms of water — from a fluid in the Atlantic Ocean to rainfall in the Indian Monsoon, clouds at the root of hurricanes, and glacial ice on mountain tops and polar ice sheets — were all fundamental for our present-day understanding of both water and the global climate. Dry is an expert at tracing the deep scientific questions of the day, showing how specific scientists — fascinating people themselves — spent their lives trying to resolve those intellectual puzzles of the global environment.
Mark Carey, University of Oregon, author of In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers
In her remarkable Waters of the World, historian Sarah Dry brings to life [the] chain of researchers who helped to reveal the dynamics of Earth’s planetary systems and humanity’s growing impact on them ... As we live through a climate crisis of our own making, the book reveals how researchers, over more than 150 years, defined and measured the processes that got us here — and gave us the knowledge we need to curb their worst impacts.
Ruth A. Morgan, Nature
Sarah Dry’s Waters of the World offers the big science of water … Dry’s call to use her scientific history of the climate to ‘prepare us to see differently, to use the difference of the past to help us conceive of the future with more options in mind’ is laudable.
Financial Times
Dry takes readers on a journey through the history of climate science in this smart, compelling, and timely title. By focusing on specific scientists, Dry gifts readers with entertaining portraits of some thoroughly interesting if largely unknown individuals ... She shows how an artful blending of the personal and professional can result in unusually affecting scientific profiles. A true success on every literary level. STARRED REVIEW
Booklist
Characterised by strong storytelling within a scholarly framework, this book will appeal to readers interested in how science is performed and accomplished, and anyone curious about Earth’s changing climate.
Library Journal
In a very limited nutshell, the story of how we, today, have meteorological forecasts that are getting nearer and nearer to being correct is down to astronomers, simple old time sailor logic, men dabbling in weather research, the British Raj, and the attempt to predict the Monsoon after several years of famine. It all makes a fantastic compilation.
NB
An illuminating tour through 150 years of the history of a significant but underappreciated idea: that the Earth has a global climate system made up of interconnected parts, constantly changing on all scales of both time and space.
Readings
This is a skilful, clever and entertaining book and a definite must-read for anyone left scratching their head on climate change.
Sarah Hudson, The Weekly Times
[An] exacting but rewarding read … this is one of the many books that Federal MPs should read and understand before they can qualify for office.
Grey Kelly, Talking Heads Magazine
Dry’s writing is both powerful and poetic.
Michael Adams, Australian Book Review
It reminds us how little we once knew and how, not long ago, scientists made mistakes as big, crazy, and glorious as their discoveries. It also reminds us how young the idea of connectedness is; we are in the infancy of understanding how everything from ice sheets to ocean gyres are interwoven. Perhaps here is where Dry is onto something. Maybe our grasp of that connectedness will be the key to facing climate change, humanity’s biggest challenge.
Gretchen Lida, Washington Independent Review of Books
Waters of the World takes readers from the lab to the study to the field and back again … [It is] an accessible work of science history that draws on some of the best recent scholarship in the field … A history that functions as a plea for interdisciplinary work on the problem of climate. The book ends with a call to climate scientists to embrace their interdisciplinary roots and to recognise and celebrate that there are ‘multiple ways of knowing the planet’.
Lydia Barnett, Science
In the eight detailed, immensely readable essays of Waters of the World, Dry shows how over the past 150 years scientists have slowly come to see climate as a global system, and to recognise how human activity contributes to changes in the complex interactions of ice, oceans, and the atmosphere … Dry looks beneath her subjects’ masks with sympathy and curiosity. Noting their shared sense of a quest, at once playful and serious, in the end she turns back to the reader: ‘They each, in their own way, sought something deeply meaningful from their engagement with the planet. So should we all’.
Jenny Uglow, New York Review of Books
Dry’s assured and fluid prose unravels the complicated concepts across the disciplines that comprise climate science. The interconnected forces that move heat from tropics to poles and that drive ocean and air currents are analysed in a masterful, entertaining way. It becomes clear that Earth operates as a complex and turbulent machine. Waters of the World chronicles how much we have learned, how much we don’t know, and how much we need to learn if we are to halt the pace of global warming.
Rachel Jagareski, Foreword Reviews
Science historian Dry presents smart, entertaining, and timely profiles of intriguing, little-known scientists and their epic research into the power of water in all of its forms and its role in shaping climate.
Donna Seaman, Booklist, ‘Top Ten Sci-Tech: 2019’
In this work, science historian Dry describes key early discoveries in the hydrological cycle and in climate science through the lens of the scientists responsible for those advances … Designed to be readily consumed by non-specialists, the book is accessibly written and liberally peppered with humorous anecdotes … Highly recommended.
S.C. Pryor, Choice
The stories cover nearly 200 years of history, and along the way, Dry builds a clear and cogent picture of Earth’s climate system from the different disciplinary foundations of her chosen characters. It is unusual for a history book to contribute to the readers’ appreciation and knowledge of both science and history, but Dry has accomplished that … She highlights how the pursuit of knowledge by scientists is often also a personal pursuit of wonder, adventure, beauty, and peace. … I highly recommend it. I think experts and nonscientists will enjoy the read, and both will gain perspective they didn’t have before.
K. Halimeda Kilbourne, Physics Today
Deborah R. Coen, author of Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale
An account of the two-hundred-year effort to understand the world’s climate system, Waters of the World is not only timely but also one of the most beautifully written books on science that I have seen in a long time. It is one thing to communicate this complex and important topic lucidly, but quite another to make the material seductive, poetic, enthralling. I was left wanting to read John Tyndall’s writings on ice, to hear the epic creak of Alpine glaciers, to go cloud-spotting off Tenerife and float turnips in Scottish lochs. Describing one of the most vital but least visible histories in modern science, and rescuing from neglect a host of pioneers who helped us to see how our planet works, it is a remarkable achievement.
Philip Ball, author of H20: A Biography of Water and the Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China
In this cleverly argued and brilliantly written history, Dry traces the interaction between the dramatic careers of six major figures in the history of climatology and the uneven and surprising emergence of a science of climate since the mid-nineteenth century. The book illuminates its history with tales of mountain climbing and dramatic voyages, of tell-tale ice cores and threatening hurricanes. No set of stories could be more urgent now and in need of the care and intelligence with which they are told here. In showing how the focus of these engaging and energetic scientists and their many colleagues gradually shifted from a collective search for the principles of a global climate system to visions of dynamic, interactive and unstable climates in change, this book has much to teach about the roots of the most reliable knowledge of climate and how it should be best understood in its full historical and cultural setting.
Simon Schaffer, Professor of the history and philosophy of science, University of Cambridge
Part history, part biography, part scientific tutorial, part philosophy, Dry humanises and personalises the science of climate change as it has evolved over time. By focusing on a wide selection of important contributors dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Tyndall, Smyth, Riehl, Malkus Simpson, Stommel, Dansgaard, and numerous others) the human story emerges from the science. She describes the fits and starts, the emotional elements, conceptual and observational difficulties, and the sheer fun these scientists had along the way as the understanding of climate emerged as a serious intellectual endeavour.
Carl Wunsch, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physical Oceanography, Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In compelling portraits of six scientists and their work, Dry probes the origins of what we now call climate science. She brings alive scientific mysteries about glaciers, clouds, oceans and the atmosphere to show how our present understanding of climate as a complex global system developed over the last 170 years. It’s a brilliant historical jigsaw puzzle, revealing how big questions about our planet have evolved and interlocked. But more than this, she makes a powerful argument about what it means to study the earth. Our knowledge of our planet, and our place on it, grew from concerns and assumptions that are as dynamic and full of change as the natural phenomena we study. How are we driven to ask the questions about nature that we do? Dry’s answers take us to the human heart of science. Exploring her subjects with unfailing insight, she brings each individual set of intellectual passions into focus. Stepping gracefully from Victorian England to late twentieth century Greenland, her biographies illuminate the combination of speculation, observation, calculation, and assumptions that have shaped science at different moments in the past. As she says, global visions come from individuals, particular places and moments in time. Such a profoundly human account of knowledge-building may be our best guide to thinking about the planet’s future.
Katharine Anderson, York University, author of Predicting the Weather
Waters of the World offers a far-reaching and wonderfully unique take on the history of climate science. Focusing on key scientists, some less known than others, the book illustrates vividly and through fine details how studies of different forms of water — from a fluid in the Atlantic Ocean to rainfall in the Indian Monsoon, clouds at the root of hurricanes, and glacial ice on mountain tops and polar ice sheets — were all fundamental for our present-day understanding of both water and the global climate. Dry is an expert at tracing the deep scientific questions of the day, showing how specific scientists — fascinating people themselves — spent their lives trying to resolve those intellectual puzzles of the global environment.
Mark Carey, University of Oregon, author of In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers
In her remarkable Waters of the World, historian Sarah Dry brings to life [the] chain of researchers who helped to reveal the dynamics of Earth’s planetary systems and humanity’s growing impact on them ... As we live through a climate crisis of our own making, the book reveals how researchers, over more than 150 years, defined and measured the processes that got us here — and gave us the knowledge we need to curb their worst impacts.
Ruth A. Morgan, Nature
Sarah Dry’s Waters of the World offers the big science of water … Dry’s call to use her scientific history of the climate to ‘prepare us to see differently, to use the difference of the past to help us conceive of the future with more options in mind’ is laudable.
Financial Times
Dry takes readers on a journey through the history of climate science in this smart, compelling, and timely title. By focusing on specific scientists, Dry gifts readers with entertaining portraits of some thoroughly interesting if largely unknown individuals ... She shows how an artful blending of the personal and professional can result in unusually affecting scientific profiles. A true success on every literary level. STARRED REVIEW
Booklist
Characterised by strong storytelling within a scholarly framework, this book will appeal to readers interested in how science is performed and accomplished, and anyone curious about Earth’s changing climate.
Library Journal
In a very limited nutshell, the story of how we, today, have meteorological forecasts that are getting nearer and nearer to being correct is down to astronomers, simple old time sailor logic, men dabbling in weather research, the British Raj, and the attempt to predict the Monsoon after several years of famine. It all makes a fantastic compilation.
NB
An illuminating tour through 150 years of the history of a significant but underappreciated idea: that the Earth has a global climate system made up of interconnected parts, constantly changing on all scales of both time and space.
Readings
This is a skilful, clever and entertaining book and a definite must-read for anyone left scratching their head on climate change.
Sarah Hudson, The Weekly Times
[An] exacting but rewarding read … this is one of the many books that Federal MPs should read and understand before they can qualify for office.
Grey Kelly, Talking Heads Magazine
Dry’s writing is both powerful and poetic.
Michael Adams, Australian Book Review
It reminds us how little we once knew and how, not long ago, scientists made mistakes as big, crazy, and glorious as their discoveries. It also reminds us how young the idea of connectedness is; we are in the infancy of understanding how everything from ice sheets to ocean gyres are interwoven. Perhaps here is where Dry is onto something. Maybe our grasp of that connectedness will be the key to facing climate change, humanity’s biggest challenge.
Gretchen Lida, Washington Independent Review of Books
Waters of the World takes readers from the lab to the study to the field and back again … [It is] an accessible work of science history that draws on some of the best recent scholarship in the field … A history that functions as a plea for interdisciplinary work on the problem of climate. The book ends with a call to climate scientists to embrace their interdisciplinary roots and to recognise and celebrate that there are ‘multiple ways of knowing the planet’.
Lydia Barnett, Science
In the eight detailed, immensely readable essays of Waters of the World, Dry shows how over the past 150 years scientists have slowly come to see climate as a global system, and to recognise how human activity contributes to changes in the complex interactions of ice, oceans, and the atmosphere … Dry looks beneath her subjects’ masks with sympathy and curiosity. Noting their shared sense of a quest, at once playful and serious, in the end she turns back to the reader: ‘They each, in their own way, sought something deeply meaningful from their engagement with the planet. So should we all’.
Jenny Uglow, New York Review of Books
Dry’s assured and fluid prose unravels the complicated concepts across the disciplines that comprise climate science. The interconnected forces that move heat from tropics to poles and that drive ocean and air currents are analysed in a masterful, entertaining way. It becomes clear that Earth operates as a complex and turbulent machine. Waters of the World chronicles how much we have learned, how much we don’t know, and how much we need to learn if we are to halt the pace of global warming.
Rachel Jagareski, Foreword Reviews
Science historian Dry presents smart, entertaining, and timely profiles of intriguing, little-known scientists and their epic research into the power of water in all of its forms and its role in shaping climate.
Donna Seaman, Booklist, ‘Top Ten Sci-Tech: 2019’
In this work, science historian Dry describes key early discoveries in the hydrological cycle and in climate science through the lens of the scientists responsible for those advances … Designed to be readily consumed by non-specialists, the book is accessibly written and liberally peppered with humorous anecdotes … Highly recommended.
S.C. Pryor, Choice
The stories cover nearly 200 years of history, and along the way, Dry builds a clear and cogent picture of Earth’s climate system from the different disciplinary foundations of her chosen characters. It is unusual for a history book to contribute to the readers’ appreciation and knowledge of both science and history, but Dry has accomplished that … She highlights how the pursuit of knowledge by scientists is often also a personal pursuit of wonder, adventure, beauty, and peace. … I highly recommend it. I think experts and nonscientists will enjoy the read, and both will gain perspective they didn’t have before.
K. Halimeda Kilbourne, Physics Today
Read
June 29, 2020Waters of the World sparkles with lyricism and wit. Dry is a gifted storyteller, and her research into the pre-history of Earth system science has turned up gripping tales of risk, adventure, defiance, and discovery. A unique and important book.
Deborah R. Coen, author of Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale
An account of the two-hundred-year effort to understand the world’s climate system, Waters of the World is not only timely but also one of the most beautifully written books on science that I have seen in a long time. It is one thing to communicate this complex and important topic lucidly, but quite another to make the material seductive, poetic, enthralling. I was left wanting to read John Tyndall’s writings on ice, to hear the epic creak of Alpine glaciers, to go cloud-spotting off Tenerife and float turnips in Scottish lochs. Describing one of the most vital but least visible histories in modern science, and rescuing from neglect a host of pioneers who helped us to see how our planet works, it is a remarkable achievement.
Philip Ball, author of H20: A Biography of Water and the Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China
In this cleverly argued and brilliantly written history, Dry traces the interaction between the dramatic careers of six major figures in the history of climatology and the uneven and surprising emergence of a science of climate since the mid-nineteenth century. The book illuminates its history with tales of mountain climbing and dramatic voyages, of tell-tale ice cores and threatening hurricanes. No set of stories could be more urgent now and in need of the care and intelligence with which they are told here. In showing how the focus of these engaging and energetic scientists and their many colleagues gradually shifted from a collective search for the principles of a global climate system to visions of dynamic, interactive and unstable climates in change, this book has much to teach about the roots of the most reliable knowledge of climate and how it should be best understood in its full historical and cultural setting.
Simon Schaffer, Professor of the history and philosophy of science, University of Cambridge
Part history, part biography, part scientific tutorial, part philosophy, Dry humanises and personalises the science of climate change as it has evolved over time. By focusing on a wide selection of important contributors dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Tyndall, Smyth, Riehl, Malkus Simpson, Stommel, Dansgaard, and numerous others) the human story emerges from the science. She describes the fits and starts, the emotional elements, conceptual and observational difficulties, and the sheer fun these scientists had along the way as the understanding of climate emerged as a serious intellectual endeavour.
Carl Wunsch, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physical Oceanography, Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In compelling portraits of six scientists and their work, Dry probes the origins of what we now call climate science. She brings alive scientific mysteries about glaciers, clouds, oceans and the atmosphere to show how our present understanding of climate as a complex global system developed over the last 170 years. It’s a brilliant historical jigsaw puzzle, revealing how big questions about our planet have evolved and interlocked. But more than this, she makes a powerful argument about what it means to study the earth. Our knowledge of our planet, and our place on it, grew from concerns and assumptions that are as dynamic and full of change as the natural phenomena we study. How are we driven to ask the questions about nature that we do? Dry’s answers take us to the human heart of science. Exploring her subjects with unfailing insight, she brings each individual set of intellectual passions into focus. Stepping gracefully from Victorian England to late twentieth century Greenland, her biographies illuminate the combination of speculation, observation, calculation, and assumptions that have shaped science at different moments in the past. As she says, global visions come from individuals, particular places and moments in time. Such a profoundly human account of knowledge-building may be our best guide to thinking about the planet’s future.
Katharine Anderson, York University, author of Predicting the Weather
Waters of the World offers a far-reaching and wonderfully unique take on the history of climate science. Focusing on key scientists, some less known than others, the book illustrates vividly and through fine details how studies of different forms of water — from a fluid in the Atlantic Ocean to rainfall in the Indian Monsoon, clouds at the root of hurricanes, and glacial ice on mountain tops and polar ice sheets — were all fundamental for our present-day understanding of both water and the global climate. Dry is an expert at tracing the deep scientific questions of the day, showing how specific scientists — fascinating people themselves — spent their lives trying to resolve those intellectual puzzles of the global environment.
Mark Carey, University of Oregon, author of In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers
In her remarkable Waters of the World, historian Sarah Dry brings to life [the] chain of researchers who helped to reveal the dynamics of Earth’s planetary systems and humanity’s growing impact on them ... As we live through a climate crisis of our own making, the book reveals how researchers, over more than 150 years, defined and measured the processes that got us here — and gave us the knowledge we need to curb their worst impacts.
Ruth A. Morgan, Nature
Sarah Dry’s Waters of the World offers the big science of water … Dry’s call to use her scientific history of the climate to ‘prepare us to see differently, to use the difference of the past to help us conceive of the future with more options in mind’ is laudable.
Financial Times
Dry takes readers on a journey through the history of climate science in this smart, compelling, and timely title. By focusing on specific scientists, Dry gifts readers with entertaining portraits of some thoroughly interesting if largely unknown individuals ... She shows how an artful blending of the personal and professional can result in unusually affecting scientific profiles. A true success on every literary level. STARRED REVIEW
Booklist
Characterised by strong storytelling within a scholarly framework, this book will appeal to readers interested in how science is performed and accomplished, and anyone curious about Earth’s changing climate.
Library Journal
In a very limited nutshell, the story of how we, today, have meteorological forecasts that are getting nearer and nearer to being correct is down to astronomers, simple old time sailor logic, men dabbling in weather research, the British Raj, and the attempt to predict the Monsoon after several years of famine. It all makes a fantastic compilation.
NB
An illuminating tour through 150 years of the history of a significant but underappreciated idea: that the Earth has a global climate system made up of interconnected parts, constantly changing on all scales of both time and space.
Readings
This is a skilful, clever and entertaining book and a definite must-read for anyone left scratching their head on climate change.
Sarah Hudson, The Weekly Times
[An] exacting but rewarding read … this is one of the many books that Federal MPs should read and understand before they can qualify for office.
Grey Kelly, Talking Heads Magazine
Dry’s writing is both powerful and poetic.
Michael Adams, Australian Book Review
It reminds us how little we once knew and how, not long ago, scientists made mistakes as big, crazy, and glorious as their discoveries. It also reminds us how young the idea of connectedness is; we are in the infancy of understanding how everything from ice sheets to ocean gyres are interwoven. Perhaps here is where Dry is onto something. Maybe our grasp of that connectedness will be the key to facing climate change, humanity’s biggest challenge.
Gretchen Lida, Washington Independent Review of Books
Waters of the World takes readers from the lab to the study to the field and back again … [It is] an accessible work of science history that draws on some of the best recent scholarship in the field … A history that functions as a plea for interdisciplinary work on the problem of climate. The book ends with a call to climate scientists to embrace their interdisciplinary roots and to recognise and celebrate that there are ‘multiple ways of knowing the planet’.
Lydia Barnett, Science
In the eight detailed, immensely readable essays of Waters of the World, Dry shows how over the past 150 years scientists have slowly come to see climate as a global system, and to recognise how human activity contributes to changes in the complex interactions of ice, oceans, and the atmosphere … Dry looks beneath her subjects’ masks with sympathy and curiosity. Noting their shared sense of a quest, at once playful and serious, in the end she turns back to the reader: ‘They each, in their own way, sought something deeply meaningful from their engagement with the planet. So should we all’.
Jenny Uglow, New York Review of Books
Dry’s assured and fluid prose unravels the complicated concepts across the disciplines that comprise climate science. The interconnected forces that move heat from tropics to poles and that drive ocean and air currents are analysed in a masterful, entertaining way. It becomes clear that Earth operates as a complex and turbulent machine. Waters of the World chronicles how much we have learned, how much we don’t know, and how much we need to learn if we are to halt the pace of global warming.
Rachel Jagareski, Foreword Reviews
Science historian Dry presents smart, entertaining, and timely profiles of intriguing, little-known scientists and their epic research into the power of water in all of its forms and its role in shaping climate.
Donna Seaman, Booklist, ‘Top Ten Sci-Tech: 2019’
In this work, science historian Dry describes key early discoveries in the hydrological cycle and in climate science through the lens of the scientists responsible for those advances … Designed to be readily consumed by non-specialists, the book is accessibly written and liberally peppered with humorous anecdotes … Highly recommended.
S.C. Pryor, Choice
The stories cover nearly 200 years of history, and along the way, Dry builds a clear and cogent picture of Earth’s climate system from the different disciplinary foundations of her chosen characters. It is unusual for a history book to contribute to the readers’ appreciation and knowledge of both science and history, but Dry has accomplished that … She highlights how the pursuit of knowledge by scientists is often also a personal pursuit of wonder, adventure, beauty, and peace. … I highly recommend it. I think experts and nonscientists will enjoy the read, and both will gain perspective they didn’t have before.
K. Halimeda Kilbourne, Physics Today
Deborah R. Coen, author of Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale
An account of the two-hundred-year effort to understand the world’s climate system, Waters of the World is not only timely but also one of the most beautifully written books on science that I have seen in a long time. It is one thing to communicate this complex and important topic lucidly, but quite another to make the material seductive, poetic, enthralling. I was left wanting to read John Tyndall’s writings on ice, to hear the epic creak of Alpine glaciers, to go cloud-spotting off Tenerife and float turnips in Scottish lochs. Describing one of the most vital but least visible histories in modern science, and rescuing from neglect a host of pioneers who helped us to see how our planet works, it is a remarkable achievement.
Philip Ball, author of H20: A Biography of Water and the Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China
In this cleverly argued and brilliantly written history, Dry traces the interaction between the dramatic careers of six major figures in the history of climatology and the uneven and surprising emergence of a science of climate since the mid-nineteenth century. The book illuminates its history with tales of mountain climbing and dramatic voyages, of tell-tale ice cores and threatening hurricanes. No set of stories could be more urgent now and in need of the care and intelligence with which they are told here. In showing how the focus of these engaging and energetic scientists and their many colleagues gradually shifted from a collective search for the principles of a global climate system to visions of dynamic, interactive and unstable climates in change, this book has much to teach about the roots of the most reliable knowledge of climate and how it should be best understood in its full historical and cultural setting.
Simon Schaffer, Professor of the history and philosophy of science, University of Cambridge
Part history, part biography, part scientific tutorial, part philosophy, Dry humanises and personalises the science of climate change as it has evolved over time. By focusing on a wide selection of important contributors dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Tyndall, Smyth, Riehl, Malkus Simpson, Stommel, Dansgaard, and numerous others) the human story emerges from the science. She describes the fits and starts, the emotional elements, conceptual and observational difficulties, and the sheer fun these scientists had along the way as the understanding of climate emerged as a serious intellectual endeavour.
Carl Wunsch, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physical Oceanography, Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In compelling portraits of six scientists and their work, Dry probes the origins of what we now call climate science. She brings alive scientific mysteries about glaciers, clouds, oceans and the atmosphere to show how our present understanding of climate as a complex global system developed over the last 170 years. It’s a brilliant historical jigsaw puzzle, revealing how big questions about our planet have evolved and interlocked. But more than this, she makes a powerful argument about what it means to study the earth. Our knowledge of our planet, and our place on it, grew from concerns and assumptions that are as dynamic and full of change as the natural phenomena we study. How are we driven to ask the questions about nature that we do? Dry’s answers take us to the human heart of science. Exploring her subjects with unfailing insight, she brings each individual set of intellectual passions into focus. Stepping gracefully from Victorian England to late twentieth century Greenland, her biographies illuminate the combination of speculation, observation, calculation, and assumptions that have shaped science at different moments in the past. As she says, global visions come from individuals, particular places and moments in time. Such a profoundly human account of knowledge-building may be our best guide to thinking about the planet’s future.
Katharine Anderson, York University, author of Predicting the Weather
Waters of the World offers a far-reaching and wonderfully unique take on the history of climate science. Focusing on key scientists, some less known than others, the book illustrates vividly and through fine details how studies of different forms of water — from a fluid in the Atlantic Ocean to rainfall in the Indian Monsoon, clouds at the root of hurricanes, and glacial ice on mountain tops and polar ice sheets — were all fundamental for our present-day understanding of both water and the global climate. Dry is an expert at tracing the deep scientific questions of the day, showing how specific scientists — fascinating people themselves — spent their lives trying to resolve those intellectual puzzles of the global environment.
Mark Carey, University of Oregon, author of In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers
In her remarkable Waters of the World, historian Sarah Dry brings to life [the] chain of researchers who helped to reveal the dynamics of Earth’s planetary systems and humanity’s growing impact on them ... As we live through a climate crisis of our own making, the book reveals how researchers, over more than 150 years, defined and measured the processes that got us here — and gave us the knowledge we need to curb their worst impacts.
Ruth A. Morgan, Nature
Sarah Dry’s Waters of the World offers the big science of water … Dry’s call to use her scientific history of the climate to ‘prepare us to see differently, to use the difference of the past to help us conceive of the future with more options in mind’ is laudable.
Financial Times
Dry takes readers on a journey through the history of climate science in this smart, compelling, and timely title. By focusing on specific scientists, Dry gifts readers with entertaining portraits of some thoroughly interesting if largely unknown individuals ... She shows how an artful blending of the personal and professional can result in unusually affecting scientific profiles. A true success on every literary level. STARRED REVIEW
Booklist
Characterised by strong storytelling within a scholarly framework, this book will appeal to readers interested in how science is performed and accomplished, and anyone curious about Earth’s changing climate.
Library Journal
In a very limited nutshell, the story of how we, today, have meteorological forecasts that are getting nearer and nearer to being correct is down to astronomers, simple old time sailor logic, men dabbling in weather research, the British Raj, and the attempt to predict the Monsoon after several years of famine. It all makes a fantastic compilation.
NB
An illuminating tour through 150 years of the history of a significant but underappreciated idea: that the Earth has a global climate system made up of interconnected parts, constantly changing on all scales of both time and space.
Readings
This is a skilful, clever and entertaining book and a definite must-read for anyone left scratching their head on climate change.
Sarah Hudson, The Weekly Times
[An] exacting but rewarding read … this is one of the many books that Federal MPs should read and understand before they can qualify for office.
Grey Kelly, Talking Heads Magazine
Dry’s writing is both powerful and poetic.
Michael Adams, Australian Book Review
It reminds us how little we once knew and how, not long ago, scientists made mistakes as big, crazy, and glorious as their discoveries. It also reminds us how young the idea of connectedness is; we are in the infancy of understanding how everything from ice sheets to ocean gyres are interwoven. Perhaps here is where Dry is onto something. Maybe our grasp of that connectedness will be the key to facing climate change, humanity’s biggest challenge.
Gretchen Lida, Washington Independent Review of Books
Waters of the World takes readers from the lab to the study to the field and back again … [It is] an accessible work of science history that draws on some of the best recent scholarship in the field … A history that functions as a plea for interdisciplinary work on the problem of climate. The book ends with a call to climate scientists to embrace their interdisciplinary roots and to recognise and celebrate that there are ‘multiple ways of knowing the planet’.
Lydia Barnett, Science
In the eight detailed, immensely readable essays of Waters of the World, Dry shows how over the past 150 years scientists have slowly come to see climate as a global system, and to recognise how human activity contributes to changes in the complex interactions of ice, oceans, and the atmosphere … Dry looks beneath her subjects’ masks with sympathy and curiosity. Noting their shared sense of a quest, at once playful and serious, in the end she turns back to the reader: ‘They each, in their own way, sought something deeply meaningful from their engagement with the planet. So should we all’.
Jenny Uglow, New York Review of Books
Dry’s assured and fluid prose unravels the complicated concepts across the disciplines that comprise climate science. The interconnected forces that move heat from tropics to poles and that drive ocean and air currents are analysed in a masterful, entertaining way. It becomes clear that Earth operates as a complex and turbulent machine. Waters of the World chronicles how much we have learned, how much we don’t know, and how much we need to learn if we are to halt the pace of global warming.
Rachel Jagareski, Foreword Reviews
Science historian Dry presents smart, entertaining, and timely profiles of intriguing, little-known scientists and their epic research into the power of water in all of its forms and its role in shaping climate.
Donna Seaman, Booklist, ‘Top Ten Sci-Tech: 2019’
In this work, science historian Dry describes key early discoveries in the hydrological cycle and in climate science through the lens of the scientists responsible for those advances … Designed to be readily consumed by non-specialists, the book is accessibly written and liberally peppered with humorous anecdotes … Highly recommended.
S.C. Pryor, Choice
The stories cover nearly 200 years of history, and along the way, Dry builds a clear and cogent picture of Earth’s climate system from the different disciplinary foundations of her chosen characters. It is unusual for a history book to contribute to the readers’ appreciation and knowledge of both science and history, but Dry has accomplished that … She highlights how the pursuit of knowledge by scientists is often also a personal pursuit of wonder, adventure, beauty, and peace. … I highly recommend it. I think experts and nonscientists will enjoy the read, and both will gain perspective they didn’t have before.
K. Halimeda Kilbourne, Physics Today
March 25, 2022
“We are currently engaged in a global effort to understand simultaneously how our planet works and how we have affected and continue to affect it. Some of the tools we use to do so currently go by the name of climate science. This book proposes to tell the stories of a few key individuals in the history of the sciences of water in order to illuminate the broader history of human understandings of the planet over the past 150 years. In doing so, I hope to reveal not only continuities but discontinuities between the present and the past. We are inheritors of both more and less than we know.” (5)
“Global visions are necessarily made up of unglobal things—individuals, places, moments in time. This is, in itself, neither a bad nor a good thing, but it is a fact about which it is important to be aware. The concept of global knowledge is a powerful one. It may be one that we feel we need today, but this does not make it either neutral or natural. All our global visions are, like the visions described in this book, the products of individual minds working in particular places at particular times—histories that might have turned out differently. Put differently, the same Earth is there for all of us, but, to use a phrase Tyndall might have appreciated, it wears many veils. The tools with which we pull back the veils go, in this book, by the names of the various scientific disciplines into which humans have divided the study of the planet: geology, physics, astrophysics, cosmic physics, atmospheric physics, meteorology, oceanography, paleoclimatology, climate science. Those disciplines organize the methods for thinking and doing science, and in this way they, too, determine what can be known by the people who work within them. There are circles within circles of structure and chance, of painstaking preparation and the unpredictable contingencies of the day. Together, it adds up first to individual lives and the knowledge thereby produced, then to disciplinary consolidation of knowledge, and finally to something like the Bretherton diagram, a synthesis of not just the entire planet but multiple ways of knowing the planet.” (274)
“Global visions are necessarily made up of unglobal things—individuals, places, moments in time. This is, in itself, neither a bad nor a good thing, but it is a fact about which it is important to be aware. The concept of global knowledge is a powerful one. It may be one that we feel we need today, but this does not make it either neutral or natural. All our global visions are, like the visions described in this book, the products of individual minds working in particular places at particular times—histories that might have turned out differently. Put differently, the same Earth is there for all of us, but, to use a phrase Tyndall might have appreciated, it wears many veils. The tools with which we pull back the veils go, in this book, by the names of the various scientific disciplines into which humans have divided the study of the planet: geology, physics, astrophysics, cosmic physics, atmospheric physics, meteorology, oceanography, paleoclimatology, climate science. Those disciplines organize the methods for thinking and doing science, and in this way they, too, determine what can be known by the people who work within them. There are circles within circles of structure and chance, of painstaking preparation and the unpredictable contingencies of the day. Together, it adds up first to individual lives and the knowledge thereby produced, then to disciplinary consolidation of knowledge, and finally to something like the Bretherton diagram, a synthesis of not just the entire planet but multiple ways of knowing the planet.” (274)
June 30, 2020
There is a lot of tantalizing ideas in this book, which traces the construction of climate science through eight chapters dealing with different scientists and their work. Unfortunately, while there is a lot going on, it never really coheres. Dry chooses an interesting range of scientists to study, but that also leaves her with big gaps to fill in the progress of science. The result is a structure which makes some abrupt jumps, and a patchy approach to explaining both the discoveries and the process for making them doesn't help. When combined with a discussion about the personal characteristics of her subjects, the chapters are often too weighed down to be easy to read. The one-woman scientist covered is also the only one that Dry discusses the romantic entanglements of. To her credit, Dry tackles the reasons for this directly - arguing that Joanne Simpson would have wanted it that way, as her gender gave her more perspective on the importance of her emotions to her science - but it added yet another discussion into an already overstuffed narrative.
On the positive side, Dry effectively conveys the stop-start jump nature of Climatology and the ways in which our assumptions about the planet have been changed over time. Her love of science, and the people who make it, comes through and the book finishes with a strong warning about the dangers inherent in too much distance between disciplines. There was a lot to like here, it just didn't come together too well.
On the positive side, Dry effectively conveys the stop-start jump nature of Climatology and the ways in which our assumptions about the planet have been changed over time. Her love of science, and the people who make it, comes through and the book finishes with a strong warning about the dangers inherent in too much distance between disciplines. There was a lot to like here, it just didn't come together too well.
Read
June 29, 2020Waters of the World sparkles with lyricism and wit. Dry is a gifted storyteller, and her research into the pre-history of Earth system science has turned up gripping tales of risk, adventure, defiance, and discovery. A unique and important book.
Deborah R. Coen, author of Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale
An account of the two-hundred-year effort to understand the world’s climate system, Waters of the World is not only timely but also one of the most beautifully written books on science that I have seen in a long time. It is one thing to communicate this complex and important topic lucidly, but quite another to make the material seductive, poetic, enthralling. I was left wanting to read John Tyndall’s writings on ice, to hear the epic creak of Alpine glaciers, to go cloud-spotting off Tenerife and float turnips in Scottish lochs. Describing one of the most vital but least visible histories in modern science, and rescuing from neglect a host of pioneers who helped us to see how our planet works, it is a remarkable achievement.
Philip Ball, author of H20: A Biography of Water and the Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China
In this cleverly argued and brilliantly written history, Dry traces the interaction between the dramatic careers of six major figures in the history of climatology and the uneven and surprising emergence of a science of climate since the mid-nineteenth century. The book illuminates its history with tales of mountain climbing and dramatic voyages, of tell-tale ice cores and threatening hurricanes. No set of stories could be more urgent now and in need of the care and intelligence with which they are told here. In showing how the focus of these engaging and energetic scientists and their many colleagues gradually shifted from a collective search for the principles of a global climate system to visions of dynamic, interactive and unstable climates in change, this book has much to teach about the roots of the most reliable knowledge of climate and how it should be best understood in its full historical and cultural setting.
Simon Schaffer, Professor of the history and philosophy of science, University of Cambridge
Part history, part biography, part scientific tutorial, part philosophy, Dry humanises and personalises the science of climate change as it has evolved over time. By focusing on a wide selection of important contributors dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Tyndall, Smyth, Riehl, Malkus Simpson, Stommel, Dansgaard, and numerous others) the human story emerges from the science. She describes the fits and starts, the emotional elements, conceptual and observational difficulties, and the sheer fun these scientists had along the way as the understanding of climate emerged as a serious intellectual endeavour.
Carl Wunsch, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physical Oceanography, Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In compelling portraits of six scientists and their work, Dry probes the origins of what we now call climate science. She brings alive scientific mysteries about glaciers, clouds, oceans and the atmosphere to show how our present understanding of climate as a complex global system developed over the last 170 years. It’s a brilliant historical jigsaw puzzle, revealing how big questions about our planet have evolved and interlocked. But more than this, she makes a powerful argument about what it means to study the earth. Our knowledge of our planet, and our place on it, grew from concerns and assumptions that are as dynamic and full of change as the natural phenomena we study. How are we driven to ask the questions about nature that we do? Dry’s answers take us to the human heart of science. Exploring her subjects with unfailing insight, she brings each individual set of intellectual passions into focus. Stepping gracefully from Victorian England to late twentieth century Greenland, her biographies illuminate the combination of speculation, observation, calculation, and assumptions that have shaped science at different moments in the past. As she says, global visions come from individuals, particular places and moments in time. Such a profoundly human account of knowledge-building may be our best guide to thinking about the planet’s future.
Katharine Anderson, York University, author of Predicting the Weather
Waters of the World offers a far-reaching and wonderfully unique take on the history of climate science. Focusing on key scientists, some less known than others, the book illustrates vividly and through fine details how studies of different forms of water — from a fluid in the Atlantic Ocean to rainfall in the Indian Monsoon, clouds at the root of hurricanes, and glacial ice on mountain tops and polar ice sheets — were all fundamental for our present-day understanding of both water and the global climate. Dry is an expert at tracing the deep scientific questions of the day, showing how specific scientists — fascinating people themselves — spent their lives trying to resolve those intellectual puzzles of the global environment.
Mark Carey, University of Oregon, author of In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers
In her remarkable Waters of the World, historian Sarah Dry brings to life [the] chain of researchers who helped to reveal the dynamics of Earth’s planetary systems and humanity’s growing impact on them ... As we live through a climate crisis of our own making, the book reveals how researchers, over more than 150 years, defined and measured the processes that got us here — and gave us the knowledge we need to curb their worst impacts.
Ruth A. Morgan, Nature
Sarah Dry’s Waters of the World offers the big science of water … Dry’s call to use her scientific history of the climate to ‘prepare us to see differently, to use the difference of the past to help us conceive of the future with more options in mind’ is laudable.
Financial Times
Dry takes readers on a journey through the history of climate science in this smart, compelling, and timely title. By focusing on specific scientists, Dry gifts readers with entertaining portraits of some thoroughly interesting if largely unknown individuals ... She shows how an artful blending of the personal and professional can result in unusually affecting scientific profiles. A true success on every literary level. STARRED REVIEW
Booklist
Characterised by strong storytelling within a scholarly framework, this book will appeal to readers interested in how science is performed and accomplished, and anyone curious about Earth’s changing climate.
Library Journal
In a very limited nutshell, the story of how we, today, have meteorological forecasts that are getting nearer and nearer to being correct is down to astronomers, simple old time sailor logic, men dabbling in weather research, the British Raj, and the attempt to predict the Monsoon after several years of famine. It all makes a fantastic compilation.
NB
An illuminating tour through 150 years of the history of a significant but underappreciated idea: that the Earth has a global climate system made up of interconnected parts, constantly changing on all scales of both time and space.
Readings
This is a skilful, clever and entertaining book and a definite must-read for anyone left scratching their head on climate change.
Sarah Hudson, The Weekly Times
[An] exacting but rewarding read … this is one of the many books that Federal MPs should read and understand before they can qualify for office.
Grey Kelly, Talking Heads Magazine
Dry’s writing is both powerful and poetic.
Michael Adams, Australian Book Review
It reminds us how little we once knew and how, not long ago, scientists made mistakes as big, crazy, and glorious as their discoveries. It also reminds us how young the idea of connectedness is; we are in the infancy of understanding how everything from ice sheets to ocean gyres are interwoven. Perhaps here is where Dry is onto something. Maybe our grasp of that connectedness will be the key to facing climate change, humanity’s biggest challenge.
Gretchen Lida, Washington Independent Review of Books
Waters of the World takes readers from the lab to the study to the field and back again … [It is] an accessible work of science history that draws on some of the best recent scholarship in the field … A history that functions as a plea for interdisciplinary work on the problem of climate. The book ends with a call to climate scientists to embrace their interdisciplinary roots and to recognise and celebrate that there are ‘multiple ways of knowing the planet’.
Lydia Barnett, Science
In the eight detailed, immensely readable essays of Waters of the World, Dry shows how over the past 150 years scientists have slowly come to see climate as a global system, and to recognise how human activity contributes to changes in the complex interactions of ice, oceans, and the atmosphere … Dry looks beneath her subjects’ masks with sympathy and curiosity. Noting their shared sense of a quest, at once playful and serious, in the end she turns back to the reader: ‘They each, in their own way, sought something deeply meaningful from their engagement with the planet. So should we all’.
Jenny Uglow, New York Review of Books
Dry’s assured and fluid prose unravels the complicated concepts across the disciplines that comprise climate science. The interconnected forces that move heat from tropics to poles and that drive ocean and air currents are analysed in a masterful, entertaining way. It becomes clear that Earth operates as a complex and turbulent machine. Waters of the World chronicles how much we have learned, how much we don’t know, and how much we need to learn if we are to halt the pace of global warming.
Rachel Jagareski, Foreword Reviews
Science historian Dry presents smart, entertaining, and timely profiles of intriguing, little-known scientists and their epic research into the power of water in all of its forms and its role in shaping climate.
Donna Seaman, Booklist, ‘Top Ten Sci-Tech: 2019’
In this work, science historian Dry describes key early discoveries in the hydrological cycle and in climate science through the lens of the scientists responsible for those advances … Designed to be readily consumed by non-specialists, the book is accessibly written and liberally peppered with humorous anecdotes … Highly recommended.
S.C. Pryor, Choice
The stories cover nearly 200 years of history, and along the way, Dry builds a clear and cogent picture of Earth’s climate system from the different disciplinary foundations of her chosen characters. It is unusual for a history book to contribute to the readers’ appreciation and knowledge of both science and history, but Dry has accomplished that … She highlights how the pursuit of knowledge by scientists is often also a personal pursuit of wonder, adventure, beauty, and peace. … I highly recommend it. I think experts and nonscientists will enjoy the read, and both will gain perspective they didn’t have before.
K. Halimeda Kilbourne, Physics Today
Deborah R. Coen, author of Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale
An account of the two-hundred-year effort to understand the world’s climate system, Waters of the World is not only timely but also one of the most beautifully written books on science that I have seen in a long time. It is one thing to communicate this complex and important topic lucidly, but quite another to make the material seductive, poetic, enthralling. I was left wanting to read John Tyndall’s writings on ice, to hear the epic creak of Alpine glaciers, to go cloud-spotting off Tenerife and float turnips in Scottish lochs. Describing one of the most vital but least visible histories in modern science, and rescuing from neglect a host of pioneers who helped us to see how our planet works, it is a remarkable achievement.
Philip Ball, author of H20: A Biography of Water and the Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China
In this cleverly argued and brilliantly written history, Dry traces the interaction between the dramatic careers of six major figures in the history of climatology and the uneven and surprising emergence of a science of climate since the mid-nineteenth century. The book illuminates its history with tales of mountain climbing and dramatic voyages, of tell-tale ice cores and threatening hurricanes. No set of stories could be more urgent now and in need of the care and intelligence with which they are told here. In showing how the focus of these engaging and energetic scientists and their many colleagues gradually shifted from a collective search for the principles of a global climate system to visions of dynamic, interactive and unstable climates in change, this book has much to teach about the roots of the most reliable knowledge of climate and how it should be best understood in its full historical and cultural setting.
Simon Schaffer, Professor of the history and philosophy of science, University of Cambridge
Part history, part biography, part scientific tutorial, part philosophy, Dry humanises and personalises the science of climate change as it has evolved over time. By focusing on a wide selection of important contributors dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Tyndall, Smyth, Riehl, Malkus Simpson, Stommel, Dansgaard, and numerous others) the human story emerges from the science. She describes the fits and starts, the emotional elements, conceptual and observational difficulties, and the sheer fun these scientists had along the way as the understanding of climate emerged as a serious intellectual endeavour.
Carl Wunsch, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physical Oceanography, Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In compelling portraits of six scientists and their work, Dry probes the origins of what we now call climate science. She brings alive scientific mysteries about glaciers, clouds, oceans and the atmosphere to show how our present understanding of climate as a complex global system developed over the last 170 years. It’s a brilliant historical jigsaw puzzle, revealing how big questions about our planet have evolved and interlocked. But more than this, she makes a powerful argument about what it means to study the earth. Our knowledge of our planet, and our place on it, grew from concerns and assumptions that are as dynamic and full of change as the natural phenomena we study. How are we driven to ask the questions about nature that we do? Dry’s answers take us to the human heart of science. Exploring her subjects with unfailing insight, she brings each individual set of intellectual passions into focus. Stepping gracefully from Victorian England to late twentieth century Greenland, her biographies illuminate the combination of speculation, observation, calculation, and assumptions that have shaped science at different moments in the past. As she says, global visions come from individuals, particular places and moments in time. Such a profoundly human account of knowledge-building may be our best guide to thinking about the planet’s future.
Katharine Anderson, York University, author of Predicting the Weather
Waters of the World offers a far-reaching and wonderfully unique take on the history of climate science. Focusing on key scientists, some less known than others, the book illustrates vividly and through fine details how studies of different forms of water — from a fluid in the Atlantic Ocean to rainfall in the Indian Monsoon, clouds at the root of hurricanes, and glacial ice on mountain tops and polar ice sheets — were all fundamental for our present-day understanding of both water and the global climate. Dry is an expert at tracing the deep scientific questions of the day, showing how specific scientists — fascinating people themselves — spent their lives trying to resolve those intellectual puzzles of the global environment.
Mark Carey, University of Oregon, author of In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers
In her remarkable Waters of the World, historian Sarah Dry brings to life [the] chain of researchers who helped to reveal the dynamics of Earth’s planetary systems and humanity’s growing impact on them ... As we live through a climate crisis of our own making, the book reveals how researchers, over more than 150 years, defined and measured the processes that got us here — and gave us the knowledge we need to curb their worst impacts.
Ruth A. Morgan, Nature
Sarah Dry’s Waters of the World offers the big science of water … Dry’s call to use her scientific history of the climate to ‘prepare us to see differently, to use the difference of the past to help us conceive of the future with more options in mind’ is laudable.
Financial Times
Dry takes readers on a journey through the history of climate science in this smart, compelling, and timely title. By focusing on specific scientists, Dry gifts readers with entertaining portraits of some thoroughly interesting if largely unknown individuals ... She shows how an artful blending of the personal and professional can result in unusually affecting scientific profiles. A true success on every literary level. STARRED REVIEW
Booklist
Characterised by strong storytelling within a scholarly framework, this book will appeal to readers interested in how science is performed and accomplished, and anyone curious about Earth’s changing climate.
Library Journal
In a very limited nutshell, the story of how we, today, have meteorological forecasts that are getting nearer and nearer to being correct is down to astronomers, simple old time sailor logic, men dabbling in weather research, the British Raj, and the attempt to predict the Monsoon after several years of famine. It all makes a fantastic compilation.
NB
An illuminating tour through 150 years of the history of a significant but underappreciated idea: that the Earth has a global climate system made up of interconnected parts, constantly changing on all scales of both time and space.
Readings
This is a skilful, clever and entertaining book and a definite must-read for anyone left scratching their head on climate change.
Sarah Hudson, The Weekly Times
[An] exacting but rewarding read … this is one of the many books that Federal MPs should read and understand before they can qualify for office.
Grey Kelly, Talking Heads Magazine
Dry’s writing is both powerful and poetic.
Michael Adams, Australian Book Review
It reminds us how little we once knew and how, not long ago, scientists made mistakes as big, crazy, and glorious as their discoveries. It also reminds us how young the idea of connectedness is; we are in the infancy of understanding how everything from ice sheets to ocean gyres are interwoven. Perhaps here is where Dry is onto something. Maybe our grasp of that connectedness will be the key to facing climate change, humanity’s biggest challenge.
Gretchen Lida, Washington Independent Review of Books
Waters of the World takes readers from the lab to the study to the field and back again … [It is] an accessible work of science history that draws on some of the best recent scholarship in the field … A history that functions as a plea for interdisciplinary work on the problem of climate. The book ends with a call to climate scientists to embrace their interdisciplinary roots and to recognise and celebrate that there are ‘multiple ways of knowing the planet’.
Lydia Barnett, Science
In the eight detailed, immensely readable essays of Waters of the World, Dry shows how over the past 150 years scientists have slowly come to see climate as a global system, and to recognise how human activity contributes to changes in the complex interactions of ice, oceans, and the atmosphere … Dry looks beneath her subjects’ masks with sympathy and curiosity. Noting their shared sense of a quest, at once playful and serious, in the end she turns back to the reader: ‘They each, in their own way, sought something deeply meaningful from their engagement with the planet. So should we all’.
Jenny Uglow, New York Review of Books
Dry’s assured and fluid prose unravels the complicated concepts across the disciplines that comprise climate science. The interconnected forces that move heat from tropics to poles and that drive ocean and air currents are analysed in a masterful, entertaining way. It becomes clear that Earth operates as a complex and turbulent machine. Waters of the World chronicles how much we have learned, how much we don’t know, and how much we need to learn if we are to halt the pace of global warming.
Rachel Jagareski, Foreword Reviews
Science historian Dry presents smart, entertaining, and timely profiles of intriguing, little-known scientists and their epic research into the power of water in all of its forms and its role in shaping climate.
Donna Seaman, Booklist, ‘Top Ten Sci-Tech: 2019’
In this work, science historian Dry describes key early discoveries in the hydrological cycle and in climate science through the lens of the scientists responsible for those advances … Designed to be readily consumed by non-specialists, the book is accessibly written and liberally peppered with humorous anecdotes … Highly recommended.
S.C. Pryor, Choice
The stories cover nearly 200 years of history, and along the way, Dry builds a clear and cogent picture of Earth’s climate system from the different disciplinary foundations of her chosen characters. It is unusual for a history book to contribute to the readers’ appreciation and knowledge of both science and history, but Dry has accomplished that … She highlights how the pursuit of knowledge by scientists is often also a personal pursuit of wonder, adventure, beauty, and peace. … I highly recommend it. I think experts and nonscientists will enjoy the read, and both will gain perspective they didn’t have before.
K. Halimeda Kilbourne, Physics Today
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January 13, 2021«Κατά τη διάρκεια της πρόσφατης καραντίνας λόγω του κορονοϊού, τα διεθνή και εγχώρια ΜΜΕ, ανάμεσα στη συνεχή ροή ανησυχητικών ειδήσεων για την εξέλιξη της πανδημίας, μετέδωσαν μια σειρά από ειδήσεις που είχαν να κάνουν, για παράδειγμα, με τη μείωση της ατμοσφαιρικής ρύπανσης πάνω από τα μεγάλα αστικά κέντρα ή με το πώς «καθάρισε» η λιμνοθάλασσα της Βενετίας μετά από πολλά χρόνια. Ειδήσεις που υπογράμμιζαν τον «θετικό» αντίκτυπο που είχε για το περιβάλλον ο εγκλεισμός, αλλά κυρίως μας υπενθύμιζαν πως ο πλανήτης είναι ένα ενιαίο οικοσύστημα επηρεαζόμενο σε σημαντικό βαθμό από την ανθρώπινη δραστηριότητα.
Το πώς φτάσαμε να θεωρούμε δεδομένες αυτές τις ιδέες μας αφηγείται η Σάρα Ντράι (Sarah Dry), στο βιβλίο της «Τα νερά του κόσμου: Η ιστορία των επιστημόνων που αποκάλυψαν τα μυστήρια των θαλασσών, των παγετώνων, και της ατμόσφαιρας — και ενοποίησαν τον πλανήτη» (ΜτΣ). Ένα εξαιρετικά ενδιαφέρον βιβλίο που μέσω της παρουσίασης της ζωής και του έργου έξι επιστημόνων προσπαθεί βιογραφήσει την εξέλιξη του επιστημονικού κλάδου που στα τέλη του 19ου αι. ονομαζόταν «κλιματολογία» και στις αρχές του 21ου «κλιματική επιστήμη».» (Σωτήρης Τριαντάφυλλος)
Ολόκληρη η κριτική του Σωτήρη Τριαντάφυλλου στην ιστοσελίδα μας: https://marginalia.gr/arthro/peri-ane...
Το πώς φτάσαμε να θεωρούμε δεδομένες αυτές τις ιδέες μας αφηγείται η Σάρα Ντράι (Sarah Dry), στο βιβλίο της «Τα νερά του κόσμου: Η ιστορία των επιστημόνων που αποκάλυψαν τα μυστήρια των θαλασσών, των παγετώνων, και της ατμόσφαιρας — και ενοποίησαν τον πλανήτη» (ΜτΣ). Ένα εξαιρετικά ενδιαφέρον βιβλίο που μέσω της παρουσίασης της ζωής και του έργου έξι επιστημόνων προσπαθεί βιογραφήσει την εξέλιξη του επιστημονικού κλάδου που στα τέλη του 19ου αι. ονομαζόταν «κλιματολογία» και στις αρχές του 21ου «κλιματική επιστήμη».» (Σωτήρης Τριαντάφυλλος)
Ολόκληρη η κριτική του Σωτήρη Τριαντάφυλλου στην ιστοσελίδα μας: https://marginalia.gr/arthro/peri-ane...
February 18, 2025
I’m in an ecological problems/solutions class and so of course 90% of what we talk about is climate change related, but it’s all current topics. This book gave me way more of an appreciation of the years and multitudes that have brought us our current level of understanding surrounding climate. I didn’t read the book in one sitting but it didn’t feel like I was just waiting for it to end either, can’t say I enjoyed but I learned a lot
January 25, 2020
Kind of interesting but not particularly good book about various people who have been involved the weather and climatology. Book suffers a bit by being written by a non-scientist. Might be interesting if you were into the topic.
December 2, 2019
Enjoyable series of historical vignettes on the (largely physical) basis of climate science.
January 13, 2022
The chapter on "fast water" about Henry Stommel's work with ocean currents was a revelation...possibly the foundation of my next project!
February 7, 2022
You cannot study a snowflake profoundly without being led back by it step by step to the constitution of the sun It is thus throughout Nature All its parts are interdependent, and the study of any one part completely would really involve the study of all. - John Tyndall
I am not a climate expert. I am not even a science expert. I don't remember why I put this on my TBR, but I purchased it a while back and kept putting off reading it.
First, the bad: This book is not written for the layperson, I would argue. While Dry is very well-researched, I found myself often reaching for this book when I was having a hard time sleeping, because it would lull me to sleep. The details and names and experiments all seemed to run together, and yet also felt so different from each other I didn't know why I was learning about them. What did this have to do with climate change and water?
Now, the good: I do feel like I learned more about climate change from this book. Not why it happens, or how it happens, but from a historical perspective. I know that an often anti-global warming war cry is, "The weather changed without humans, we aren't the ones causing the change." Dry points out the Bretherton diagram, and while she notes that it is since outdated, I think honestly it should be taught in schools (or at least the updated version of it). It clearly outlines how humans are involved in the climate of the world (which, even until the 1970s, we didn't think of the world as having a global weather pattern). Even beyond that, though, they are right: weather has changed before. However. The Holocene (the last 12,000 years) has been unusually stable, and worse, unusually warm. You can't say, "There was an Ice Age once upon a time" without looking at more recently history, too.
More on that timeline:
1895: Svante Arrehenius makes calculations about the increase in CO2 due to humankind
1950s: sustained research into the atmosphere and global system
1975: Broecker publishes "Climate Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?"
("global" was as new a concept as global warming)
Overall, glad I read it, btu not a book I would recommend unless you are immensely interested in the climate and its history. I did learn about Camp Century, which I will be researching extensively, but if I am totally honest, most of the experiments and experimenters' names have already left my head. But I can appreciate Dry's portrayal of their investigations: That is the magic trick behind this kind of scientific work — behind, in a sense, all scientific work: a great amount of work is applied to making a small bit of nature visible in a way it has never been visible before.
I am not a climate expert. I am not even a science expert. I don't remember why I put this on my TBR, but I purchased it a while back and kept putting off reading it.
First, the bad: This book is not written for the layperson, I would argue. While Dry is very well-researched, I found myself often reaching for this book when I was having a hard time sleeping, because it would lull me to sleep. The details and names and experiments all seemed to run together, and yet also felt so different from each other I didn't know why I was learning about them. What did this have to do with climate change and water?
Now, the good: I do feel like I learned more about climate change from this book. Not why it happens, or how it happens, but from a historical perspective. I know that an often anti-global warming war cry is, "The weather changed without humans, we aren't the ones causing the change." Dry points out the Bretherton diagram, and while she notes that it is since outdated, I think honestly it should be taught in schools (or at least the updated version of it). It clearly outlines how humans are involved in the climate of the world (which, even until the 1970s, we didn't think of the world as having a global weather pattern). Even beyond that, though, they are right: weather has changed before. However. The Holocene (the last 12,000 years) has been unusually stable, and worse, unusually warm. You can't say, "There was an Ice Age once upon a time" without looking at more recently history, too.
More on that timeline:
1895: Svante Arrehenius makes calculations about the increase in CO2 due to humankind
1950s: sustained research into the atmosphere and global system
1975: Broecker publishes "Climate Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?"
("global" was as new a concept as global warming)
Overall, glad I read it, btu not a book I would recommend unless you are immensely interested in the climate and its history. I did learn about Camp Century, which I will be researching extensively, but if I am totally honest, most of the experiments and experimenters' names have already left my head. But I can appreciate Dry's portrayal of their investigations: That is the magic trick behind this kind of scientific work — behind, in a sense, all scientific work: a great amount of work is applied to making a small bit of nature visible in a way it has never been visible before.
December 16, 2023
I’ll keep it short. I am in two minds about this book. On the one hand, the way Dry weaves together small-scale, biographical narratives with large-scale, contextual narratives is very engaging and cleverly done. Choosing to tell the history of climate science from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth-century with an explicitly interdisciplinary scope (i.e. not just focusing on one scientific discipline, but on researchers from several different disciplines all studying different aspects of water – there’s the title), is also laudable and something I’d like to see more of. On the other hand, by choosing to tell this story in a biographical way still seems like it falls into the old hagiographical trap, as we get the impression that the course of climate science was directed by a few gifted (read: privileged) individuals (of your usual science-historical variety: white, male (with one exception), from the Global North). Dry does recognise this and provide justifications in the introduction and conclusion, but I’m not sure two passages at the start and end really make up for the 250+ pages of almost heroic stories from these researchers’ lives in the middle. This too gets at another uncertainty I have about the book, namely that purports to look at climate history broadly, but in taking such a broad perspective makes somewhat arbitrary choices about what to include and what not to include. The reader is treated to a variety of stories, from nuclear testing in the Cold War to Joanne Gerould/Starr/Malkus/Simpson’s love life and various husbands. In jumping so often between topics – which Dry otherwise does very well from a writing perspective – I am left wondering what other things were going on that are being left out of the story, and why these particular anecdotes or pieces of context are important. The narrow cast of protagonists doesn’t help, but neither does her title: let me be clear, the book is not really about water, but more so the global climate. Perhaps this nitpick might have been saved with a better title… but otherwise, it’s an impressive book.
December 3, 2020
Climate science – the study of how and why Earth’s climate changes over space and time – first required an understanding that there is in fact such a thing as a global climate system, and that the water in our atmosphere, oceans, and ice sheets makes the primary links in this system.
This book profiles some of the scientists who discovered these links and “made the planet whole”. I found it to be a frustrating read, despite being well written and researched. My frustration was that the topics these scientists worked on (e.g. how water vapour in the atmosphere absorbs heat and light, what causes the monsoon, how heat in the tropics is transferred to the upper atmosphere, kinetic energy of ocean currents) are only loosely connected, and Dry makes no attempt to link them and provide a synthesis. I finished the book not knowing too much more about Earth’s climate system than when I started.
Dry is quite intentional in her approach, noting that “people, not water, are the true subjects of this book. These people are scientists” and her belief that “a milestone approach to telling the history of climate science misrepresents the complexity of its deeper history.” Thus this book presents a lot of the false starts and the challenges by working scientists, at the expense of the bigger picture.
This book profiles some of the scientists who discovered these links and “made the planet whole”. I found it to be a frustrating read, despite being well written and researched. My frustration was that the topics these scientists worked on (e.g. how water vapour in the atmosphere absorbs heat and light, what causes the monsoon, how heat in the tropics is transferred to the upper atmosphere, kinetic energy of ocean currents) are only loosely connected, and Dry makes no attempt to link them and provide a synthesis. I finished the book not knowing too much more about Earth’s climate system than when I started.
Dry is quite intentional in her approach, noting that “people, not water, are the true subjects of this book. These people are scientists” and her belief that “a milestone approach to telling the history of climate science misrepresents the complexity of its deeper history.” Thus this book presents a lot of the false starts and the challenges by working scientists, at the expense of the bigger picture.
October 4, 2025
Хоть название книги может слегка вводить в заблуждение, она определённо достойна прочтения. Открытия, сформировавшие наше нынешнее понимание климата, показаны через судьбы ключевых фигур. При этом стоит понимать, что, ввиду широты темы, мы по сути «скользим по верхам» и для более детального погружения потребуется обратиться к другим источникам.
Тем не менее, было крайне интересно узнать, как люди смогли объяснить, почему пустыни такие жаркие, но при этом быстро охлаждаются ночью. Или о том, что эксперименты по искусственному воздействию на ураганы сошли на нет из-за того, что через экспериментальные (безопасные) зоны не проходило достаточное количество ураганов. В книге много неожиданных фактов, например, связь геологии и Библии.
Сара Драй также уделила внимание тому, что научный прогресс сопровождается горьким осознанием того, что учёные не всегда могли заниматься чистой наукой, будучи зависимы от финансирования политиков и военных, у которых были свои, далёкие от науки цели. Так, например, пацифист Стоммел изучал верхние слои океана, чтобы подводные лодки могли прятаться в акустической тени.
Не все загадки будут раскрыты в конце: многое, как, например, осцилляции Дансгора-Оэшгера, до сих пор остаётся предметом исследований. Тем не менее, это отличная, хорошо написанная книга, чтобы начать знакомство с темой.
July 3, 2023
This book was a mildly interesting set of biographies of people who did some work on weather prediction, glaciology, geomorphology and that sort of thing. I found some of the stories in it mildly interesting. Importantly, it was a lot of people who I had never heard of and whose stories I didn't know, which is a big plus in my book, because I find that — especially in science stories — there's a relatively short list of people who you hear a ton about, like Richard Feynman, Enrico Fermi, and Norman Borlaug. This was a list of people who I had rarely heard of, and considering how much science history content I consume, that's saying something.
Overall, the book was OK. I didn't particularly care about the subject matter, but I didn't actively want to put it down, and it was kinda cool that the author is named "Sarah Dry".
2.5 of 5 stars
Overall, the book was OK. I didn't particularly care about the subject matter, but I didn't actively want to put it down, and it was kinda cool that the author is named "Sarah Dry".
2.5 of 5 stars
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August 1, 2026This did have some pretty cool info on how our understanding of earth's climate (and related sciences) have involved (it's also so cool to see a book talk about stuff like paleoclimatology!). That said, I was somewhat disappointed with this. The book felt messy, and for chapters where I didn't have any background knowledge, I just felt I was missing something. I wish it had gotten bit more technical with explanations of the science/theories which may have helped smooth some of the issues above. I really enjoy the subject and I struggled to focus on this book at times for some reason.
October 21, 2020
Dry takes on a very complex subject--the history of climate science--and renders is accessible to non-scientists.
January 20, 2023
very interesting and detailed book about climate science. The mechanism of weather and climate changes is shown. Interestingly, almost nothing is said about "global warming"
June 8, 2023
Great history of science and good primer for better understanding our existential environmental challenges.
October 12, 2023
A little dry. Interesting info though.
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