num_pages: 552
description: The science behind global warming and its history: how scientists learned to understand the atmosphere to measure it to trace its past and to model its future.Global warming skeptics often fall back on the argument that the scientific case for global warming is all model predictions nothing but simulation; they warn us that we need to wait for real data sound science. In A Vast Machine Paul Edwards has news for these skeptics: without models there are no data. Today no collection of signals or observationseven from satellites which can see the whole planet with a single instrumentbecomes global in time and space without passing through a series of data models. Everything we know about the world's climate we know through models. Edwards offers an engaging and innovative history of how scientists learned to understand the atmosphereto measure it trace its past and model its future.
language: English
title: A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming
publisher: The MIT Press