[Vision2020] MIT Press: Paul N. Edwards "A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming"

[Ted Moffett]

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12080

A Vast Machine
*Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming*
Paul N. Edwards <http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/author/default.asp?aid=572>

Table of Contents and Sample
Chapters<http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12080&mode=toc>

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 observations—even from
satellites, which can "see" the whole planet with a single
instrument—becomes 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 atmosphere—to measure it, trace its past, and
model its future.

Edwards argues that all our knowledge about climate change comes from three
kinds of computer models: simulation models of weather and climate;
reanalysis models, which recreate climate history from historical weather
data; and data models, used to combine and adjust measurements from many
different sources. Meteorology creates knowledge through an infrastructure
(weather stations and other data platforms) that covers the whole world,
making global data. This infrastructure generates information so vast in
quantity and so diverse in quality and form that it can be understood only
by computer analysis—making data global. Edwards describes the science
behind the scientific consensus on climate change, arguing that over the
years data and models have converged to create a stable, reliable, and
trustworthy basis for establishing the reality of global warming.

*About the Author*

Paul N. Edwards is Associate Professor in the School of Information at the
University of Michigan. He is the author of *The Closed World: Computers and
the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America* (1996) and a coeditor (with
Clark Miller) of *Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and
Environmental Governance* (2001), both published by the MIT Press.

    Reviews

"I recommend this book with considerable enthusiasm. Although it’s a term
reviewers have made into a cliché, I think *A Vast Machine* is nothing less
than a tour de force. It is the most complete and balanced description we
have of two sciences whose results and recommendations will, in the years
ahead, be ever more intertwined with the decisions of political leaders and
the fate of the human species."
—*Noel Castree*, *American Scientist*

"A thorough and dispassionate analysis by a historian of science and
technology, Paul Edwards' book is well timed. Although written before the
University of East Anglia e-mail leak, it anticipates many of the issues
raised by the 'climategate' affair. [...] *A Vast Machine* puts the whole
affair into historical context and should be compulsory reading for anyone
who now feels empowered to pontificate on how climate science should be
done."
—*Myles Allen*, *Nature*


    Endorsements

"*A Vast Machine* is a beautifully written, analytically insightful, and
hugely well-informed account of the development and influence of the models
and data that are the foundation of our knowledge that the climate is
changing and that human beings are making it change."
—*Donald MacKenzie*, Professor of Sociology, University of Edinburgh, author
of *An Engine, Not a Camera*

“This important and articulate book explains how scientists learned to
understand the atmosphere, measure it, trace its past, and model its future.
Edwards counters skepticism and doom with compelling reasons for hope and a
call to action.”
—*James Rodger Fleming*, Professor of Science, Technology and Society, Colby
College

“With this new book, Paul Edwards once again writes the history of
technology on a grand scale. Through his investigation of computational
science, international governance, and scientific knowledge production, he
shows that the very ability to conceptualize a global climate as such is
wrapped up in the history of these institutions and their technological
infrastructure. In telling this story, Edwards again makes an original
contribution to a crowded field.”
—*Greg Downey*, University of Wisconsin-Madison
------------------------------------------
Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20100913/31d08e05/attachment-0001.html