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

The writing and selection of papers is fascinating, but several of the newer papers were originally published in color. Reprinting them in black-and-white makes the figures impossible to read. (Would recommend any reader download the original papers and glue the colored images over the black-and-white ones. I did.)

Incredible review of the most important climate papers of the last 100+ years.

Very interesting technical textbook. Articles from 1824 to 2000. Quality printing.

If you enjoy reading seminal papers, this book is for you.

I recommend this book for those people willing to learn the stories behind climate science.I came to this book after four years of learning about fossil fuel climate deception as well as US Government climate deception. I created web sites to alert people to this deception. I needed more facts than found on YouTube and elsewhere online. NASA helped, but I needed content, and the Warming Papers gives me a lot of original content to make my case against climate deniers and climate deception personalities.I now have YouTube channels. These channels and my web sites I advertise on my vehicles and t-shirts. Spencer Wheart's The Discovery of Global Warming gave me a lot of information; I grew to want more, and Archer's books lead to new insights and understanding. This morning I read Fourier's translated comments and could not contain myself.Fourier wrote on the influence of solar radiation on Earth as early as 1808 in matters related to subsurface temperature variations; he wrote, as many of us know now, that CO2 acted as a greenhouse gas in his 1824 paper. He wrote about so much that we would find expanded upon by Croll and Malankovich. There's so much here that anyone with interest in the history of climate science, how it came to us will find this book belongs close at hand.I'm using the Kindle edition and will buy a paperback edition once I find some more work.

From Justin Gillis'/NYT review:I was enthused recently when "The Warming Papers" came to my attention.A hefty new volume published by Wiley-Blackwell and edited by the climate scientists David Archer and Raymond Pierrehumbert at the University of Chicago, it's a rich feast for anyone who wants to trace the history of climate science from its earliest origins to the present.(Note that it's a pricey book, north of $60 in paperback and closer to $150 in hardback -- so perhaps it won't be an impulse purchase for many people. But I suspect well-stocked libraries will have it, and even if yours doesn't, you should be able to get a copy through interlibrary loan. And the book might work for college classes in climate science; by textbook standards, $60 is a steal.)The idea of the book is to present the touchstone scientific papers in the field, all of which have in some way stood the test of time, even if not in all their details. The book begins, for instance, by reprinting the 1827 paper "On the Temperatures of the Terrestrial Sphere and Interplanetary Space," in which Joseph Fourier discovered the phenomenon we now call the greenhouse effect.It includes an 1861 paper in which John Tyndall measured, with considerable precision, the heat-trapping powers of water vapor, carbon dioxide and other trace gases in the atmosphere, and speculated that changing the concentration of some gases might alter the Earth's climate.And most delightfully, the editors included the 1896 paper [...]in which a Swedish scientist, Svante Arrhenius, spelled out the implications of an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Arrhenius did the hard mathematics to predict what might happen to the temperature of the planet if the carbon dioxide level doubled.Although he made some errors, he came up with a number, 11 degrees Fahrenheit, that is in the same range as modern forecasts, albeit at the high end of most of them. The editors write, "In Arrhenius' 1896 paper we witness the birth of modern climate science.""The Warming Papers" goes on to reprint many of the seminal modern papers on climate change, including reports from Charles David Keeling about his pioneering measurements of carbon dioxide. It includes papers from the 1960s and 1970s in which Syukuro Manabe and his colleagues at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton worked out the mathematics needed to build computerized models of the atmosphere. Those have become fundamental tools of the science.Dr. Pierrehumbert pointed out to me in an e-mail that reading the older papers should dispel for anyone the oft-heard claim "that climate science is `in its infancy' " -- it has, in reality, been making predictions since the 19th century, and we are now living in an era when those predictions are coming true."It's exciting to read original scientific papers, to follow along as people struggle with figuring things out," Dr. Archer told me in an e-mail. "For the climate-change question, there is another point to be made, about how deep the roots of the ideas go, how far back in time. The forecast for global warming predates the actual anomalous warming by many decades."

$80 for the eBook?! This author/publisher is more interested in making money then spreading the word about climate.

To me The Warming Papers has been a welcome addition to my growing library on Climate Change and Global Warming (the difference between those two is often missed by the naysayers i.e., deniers or skeptics e.g., Solomon, Michaels, Lindzen, Spencer, Carter, Plimer, Booker and North, Montford, Feldman and Marks. Lawson). As somebody now outside of academia but having had the benefit of scientific and mathematical instruction at many stages of my life I could tackle the topics with varying degrees of understanding and will continue to dig deeper. However I have some papers yet to study in this large collection.This book satisfies some of the itch engendered by reading such as Richard Alley's 'The Two Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future', David Archer's 'The Long Thaw' and 'Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast', Wally Broecker's 'The Great Ocean Conveyor' and 'Climate Change: A Multidisciplinary Approach' by William James Burroughs.Burroughs book title hints at the complexity of the subject and also the difficulties scientists have in quickly dismissing the cherry picked factoids and sound byte length quotes of the deniers whilst engaged with such on mainstream media channels. A good primer on Oceanography would be a useful addition for the interested layman such a one is that by Tom Garrison, 'Oceanography: An Invitation to Marine Science' and for a well presented history of the geological and biological evolution of the Earth, 'Cassell's Atlas of Evolution: The Earth, its Landscape, and Life Forms' will go down well with all ages.What The Warming Papers does is provide useful information for those with an open enough mind wishing to continue to explore the scientific underpinning of the current state of knowledge at greater depth than the titles mentioned above. You will then be armed with some of the knowledge required to counter the arguments of those indicated in the first paragraph above.My only reservation is that there are not that many recent papers published in this book (hence only four stars) but the one on Greenland ice melt is very welcome.I endorse the recommendation of another reviewer to find a copy of 'The Rough Guide to Climate Change', therein will be found website urls to other useful and most importantly reliable sources.

If you're not a scientist this is likely to be hard going for you, my first year undergraduate knowledge of science is barely adequate to the task and I found it an effort to carry on reading in places. Being a collected work there are a number of different writing styles here ranging from the occasionally chirpy editors, to translations, dry scientific texts and the oddities of nineteenth century writing. This inconsistent mix at least means you don't have to put up with a dull writing style for very long and there will be another one along in a few pages.Each paper gets an introduction, on some largely explaining things to be aware of (like features of the translation or explanations of obsolete terms) but also concerning itself with the outline of the article and its impact, this is helpful if you're not sure why the piece you're reading is significant. The choice of papers means a range of topics are covered from Referencing seems good, the index is a little short but the contents makes it easy to move round the book and the text is well printed on a decent, waxy feeling paper. It has the feel of a good textbook.As a work concerned with the foundation of climate science, the past, it has the advantage that it can't easily go out of date so an interested reader is likely to be able to get some years of value from it, especially as the book is well printed in good quality paper. As to who may benefit from this book, realistically you would have to have some background in the subject to obtain the full benefit of this book so a student looking for a broader understanding of the topic or a very well read lay reader, but mostly I'd suggest it is a book for students and academics.

Other reviewers have summed up the attractions of this book for those studying environmental sciences - a gift for anyone faced with the dissertation title `describe the emergence of understanding on climate change from 1824 to the present day'. For others, including me, the benefit is more muted.This collation of academic papers is divided into themed chapters that are introduced with quite readable but short introductions of between 2 and 4 pages. Reading those alone gave me a good grasp of how this subject has developed and the issues. Nevertheless, they do not total a book's worth of reading and few of the papers tempted me to dip in.Some chapter headings suggest that the editors were aiming to introduce a little pizzazz to the subject (`Wagging the dog', `By the light of the silvery moon') but this flair is not sustained (`Ocean Heat Uptake and Committed Warming').For the student who does not want to make the effort to research abstracts and the subject themselves, the book hands the subject to them on a plate. However, I suspect that the committed student would be able to compile and obtain the underlying papers from an afternoon in the library and probably extend their grasp of the territory along the way.The publisher and/or editors have rewarded themselves well for collating and organising 32 scientific papers on the subject and writing brief linking forewords. Had the editors extended their commentaries a student might feel their efforts more deserving. Had they attempted to bridge the gap between academic work and the lay reader, the book might have offered broader appeal.

I have been gradually reading through this book over the months that it has been in my possession and feeling glad that I have done so but I must admit that it can be challenging for the non-expert - even the scientifically literate one. I won't claim to have understood everything within despite my (rather dusty) physics degree but I did learn a lot and find it is a fascinating insight into how ideas are conceived, evolve, disappear and reappear in science. Anyone who claims that the case for global warming is based on a green/liberal agenda needs to at least recognise the long a varied history of climate science.There's a vast amount of material to absorb and many areas that you will probably wish to skim through unless your education or profession requires you to be conversant in all the details. But the key result is that you are accessing the original publications on which the case for global warming is built rather than relying on some intermediary to digest & regurgitate on your behalf. If you like your science raw and undigested then this is for you.

This book collects together scientific research, beginning with Fourier's' 1824 paper `On the Temperatures of the Terrestrial Sphere and Interplanetary Space' and spanning almost two centuries, which forms the foundation of climate change theory. The editors summarise each paper and add revisions from more up to date research, as well as clarifying the inaccessible language of older papers. The book is subdivided into two sections, Climate Physics and The Carbon Cycle. It's aimed at students and scientists and as such requires a scientific background to understand much of the content. As an Environmental Science student, this book is like a goldmine of information to me, collating almost two hundred years worth of climate change research into one accessible volume. As a previous reviewer states, it may be disappointing to a non-scientist seeking a primer on the climate change debate. If this is what you're searching for I recommend `The Rough Guide to Climate Change' or `Global Warming: A Very Short Introduction..