- ISBN13: 9780674031890
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
The award-winning book is now revised and expanded. In 2001 an international panel of distinguished climate scientists announced that the world was warming at a rate without precedent during at least the last ten millennia, and that warming was caused by the buildup of greenhouse gases from human activity. The story of how scientists reached that conclusion—by way of unexpected twists and turns—was the story Spencer Weart told in The Discovery of Global War... More >>
The Discovery of Global Warming: Revised and Expanded Edition
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Dr. Weart has received an extra star for his attempt to cover the early history of climate science. That’s it.
I was kind of disgusted by this book because what I expected was a story about some scientific discoveries connected with the global climate. A story about the history of science is always fun to read even if it is a little bit biased – for example towards the advocates of the global warming which was expected in this case.
Instead, this book is mostly a story about the money. It’s a story about a group of greedy people who were not satisfied with their funding as the scientists and with the “boring” objective tasks that a scientist must usually solve, and who always wanted to find new sources of funding by claiming a “discovery” of something new and sensational. And Dr. Weart is completely open and reveals his opinion that it is OK if science is affected by politics. In fact he enjoys it, and as a historian of science, he is happy to analyze this interaction.
Let’s hope that I am not the only one who believes that it is unacceptable for scientific research to be affected by politics, and on the other hand that science cannot determine which policies should be adopted.
If you see the book, try to count how many times the word “funding” appears in it. I find it completely scary. The truth in science does not depend on the money! These global warming alarmists seem to be a culture for which science is a hostage and a tool to achieve something completely different.
If you open this book, you will see many stories about some scientists who were supposed to measure the concentration of some gas somewhere – according to the old-fashioned, objective rules of science. Because they knew that it’s unlikely that anything shocking would be found in this way, they decided that they wanted to measure something completely different – something that can be used to argue that there is a big “discovery” – this bogus discovery was finally called “global warming” (well, after the attempts in the 1970s to call it “global cooling”).
It is a great “theory” that predicts something 20 years from now – a short enough period to scare the people, but a long enough period to get funding for a long time and to allow the people to forget that you were wrong once it’s proved. It’s a theory that Weart admits won’t ever be quite convincing, but nevertheless the decision making should be based on it.
The book offers, much like many similar books, simplistic arguments that the global climate is simple and its models should be right. Weart does not hesitate to claim that the temperature in 2050 will be up to 5.5 Celsius degrees higher, even though it is known that the temperature in the last 100 years only rose by 0.6 degrees or so.
Even if you forget whether the global warming is true or not, the history as described in this book is completely twisted. For example, it is focused on America only. There is nothing about the 20th century European scientists, for example. And of course, there is nothing about e.g. the influential Russian Academy of Science that identified the Kyoto protocol as a “scientifically unfounded nonsense”.
Mr. Weart won’t tell you such things – instead, he will brainwash you with the obnoxious lies about the “scientific consensus” – this consensus has become the only real “argument” of the “evangelists”. It’s because he kind of knows that Goebbels said correctly that a lie that is repeated 100 times “becomes” the truth.
The global climate has been a politicized topic for many decades – but this is one of the first books I’ve seen which is completely open about the fact that the global warming alarmists are twisting the data – and picking their problems – in order to get more funding and in order to support their political allies.
Weart also happily attacks the global warming skeptics by the characteristic far left-wing argument that they may have some links to the corporations. Well, I will probably prefer a person paid by a corporation over a person who wants to destroy the corporations – but the actual scientific results don’t depend on such things as long as science is done properly. Weart openly says that it should not be done properly.
Weart’s book actually describes the very same people as Crichton’s “State of Fear”. The difference is that Crichton’s novel ends with a happy end – the evil eco-terrorists are either shot, or eaten by the eco-friendly native tribes – while Weart’s novel ends as a horror: the same people are celebrated as heroes who are almost allowed to declare their rubbish comments called “global warming” as one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of the century.
I am ashamed that these global warming people are sometimes identified as our colleagues.
Dr. Lubos Motl, Harvard University
Rating: 2 / 5
In “The Discovery of Global Warming,” Spencer R. Weart’s stated objective is to write “the history of the science of climate change”(xii). But, he proposes, the discovery of man’s effect on the earth’s climate is outside the rules of normal scientific methodology.
Weart argues that “the tangled nature of climate research reflects nature itself. The earth’s climate system is so irreducibly complicated that we will never grasp it completely, in the way that one might grasp a law of physics.”(ix) Isn’t this bogus science? Does not removing the study from the discipline of the scientific method unduly permit individual or social biases to skew scientific findings? In Weart’s treatise scientific discoveries are nothing more than the consensus of attendees, albeit scientists, at conventions. Conclusions which are the result of give and take among a cohort cannot substitute for rigorous experimentation and independent verification.
While admittedly the study of climate is multidisciplinary, that is not an excuse to sideline the scientific method. Weart counters, “such a logical sequence, with definitive results, does not describe work in interdisciplinary fields like the study of climate change.”(viii) Thus it seems a questionable methodology is the founding principle of the science of global warming.
The scientific method instills discipline and methodology into discovery. It is a process based on four steps: observation and description which leads to the formulation of an hypothesis to predict a phenomena that is then confirmed by independent testing. Weart et al are hung up on the first step. They observe and describe a phenomena, i.e. global warming, then are convinced that mankind is the cause? That the earth is in a warming cycle seems self evident. Milder winters, glacial melting, land use and the burning of fossil fuels, are reasons to speculate that humanity is a contributor, but the cause? Where is the evidence? Where is the verification?
Extreme weather is reported and frequently taken as indication of man’s effect on the earth’s climate. The number and severity of hurricanes in 2005 seemingly raises that possibility. The biggest improvement in tracking hurricanes has come from satellite imagery which permits advanced warning. Just as the weather service uses sophisticated models to predict hurricane tracks, computer models purport to predict climate change. Predicting the paths of hurricanes remains unreliable and the models cannot foretell landfall precisely.
The inability to accurately forecast and predict the behavior of hurricanes escalates the costs and inconvenience of preparations. Imagine what the costs would be for errors on a global scale! Would not it be a more prudent goal to first be able to perfect models that accurately predict something “simple” like hurricane paths (or tornadoes, or droughts?) before we place our trust in climate models to predict something more complex as man’s effect on global warming?
Global warming is certainly a hot button topic. Its relevance will not recede in the ensuing years but the politicizing of science is not the answer. Incontrovertably it is in man’s best interest to protect the environment, but in a reasonable manner. Absent scientific verification of man’s culpability for global warming, the difficulty is in defining the meaning of reasonable and manner. That is a political issue and, contrary to Weart’s assertion, we have not “run out of time.”(200)
Rating: 3 / 5
I have to admit that I am not a skeptic of global warming, so I appreciate Spencer Weart’s book as a “friend.” Actually I am quite worried about global warming and what will happen to our beautiful earth, the one where all of us, Democrats and Republicans alike, have to live on and where we want to go on vacation and bequeath to our children and grandchildren and so on. Not to mention the animals!!!!
I was so impressed by Dr. Weart’s excellent exposition of the scientific debate process that I would recommend it to any student for that alone. Just how does science reach a consensus that now is considered accepted fact, and I mean anything, not just global warming? For instance, the ice ages and even the existence of prehistoric life was once considered ridiculous, largely because of religious considerations. Not to mention evolution!!!
One thing that really impressed me was how he talked about the scientific publication community, how that works, what happens, and how years of a person’s life can go into saying just one important sentence in a science paper.
Dr. Weart also showed how politics intersects with science, often in a very nasty manner. Nobody can remain objective anymore. Billions, nay trillions, of dollars are at stake. I laughed at his oft-repeated refrain (capitalization is his) More Money Should Be Spent On Research.
I only cry that this book was published in 2003 and not in 2006. Maybe he will do an update soon. I hope that our grandchildren will someday read books like this and smile, “Why did they ever worry so much about that???” Either global warming will turn out to be a chimera (unlikely) or the future people will discover neat ways to counteract it (I hope.)
All in all, many kudos to Dr. Weart! Thanks for a beautifully written book.
Rating: 5 / 5
I found this book to be very well written and interesting. I am glad to have read it, for I now understand much better the evolution of the current reasoning on the subject of global warming. However, as an engineer used to dealing with hard data, I was disappointed in what it did not cover. The whole point of this controversy is whether or not the “global average temperature” has gone up a degree or so in the last hundred years, and whether this trend is accelerating because of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Yet, the term “global average temperature” is never really defined in terms of how it is measured currently. The book does not explain why the increase in carbon dioxide does not prevent the heat from the sun from arriving at the earth’s surface and therefore cause cooling! Charts are presented showing temperature variations going back a thousand years or more, yet the calibrated thermometer was only developed in the early 1700′s. I don’t know whether global warming is occurring or not, but I am very suspicious that it is an elegant theory, based on very sophisticated computer models, that is not backed up by enough hard data. How many and where were temperature data points taken 100 years ago? The book does not reveal these important facts, and I wonder if it is not because the basis is so flimsy that the proponents do not want it to be known.
Rating: 3 / 5
Spencer R. Weart’s The Discovery Of Global Warming is a good primer on how scientists discovered global warming and why most scientists think that humans are at least partially responsible for that warming. The book is APOLITICAL, thorough, and should be understood by anybody with at least a middle school science education. One of the best aspects of the book is how well Weart describes the process of science. Personally, I find it unfortunate when any scientific issue becomes overly politicized. Scientific issues are settled based on empirical evidence, not along party lines and not by opinion poll. Good science often reveals things about the universe that we’d rather have work some other way. If you want to read only one book about global warming, I would recommend The Discovery Of Global Warming. If you plan on reading any of the more polemical volumes on the issue, I recommend that you also read Dr. Weart’s little book.
Rating: 5 / 5