The Discovery of Global Warming : , (New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine)

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In 2001 a panel representing virtually all the world�s governments and climate scientists announced that they had reached a consensus: 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 consensus itself was at least a century in the making. The story of how scientists reached their conclusion�by way of unexpected twists and turns and in the face of formidable intellectual, financial, and political obstacles�is told for the first time in The Discovery of Global Warming. Spencer R. Weart lucidly explains the emerging science, introduces us to the major players, and shows us how the Earth�s irreducibly complicated climate system was mirrored by the global scientific community that studied it. Unlike familiar tales of Science Triumphant, this book portrays scientists working on bits and pieces of a topic so complex that they could never achieve full certainty�yet so important to human survival that provisional answers were essential. Weart unsparingly depicts the conflicts and mistakes, and how they sometimes led to fruitful results. His book reminds us that scientists do not work in isolation, but interact in crucial ways with the political system and with the general public. The book not only reveals the history of global warming, but also analyzes the nature of modern scientific work as it confronts the most difficult questions about the Earth�s future.

Reader Reviews:

This is a short book written recently (2003) by Spencer Weart, the director of the Center for History of the American Institute of Physics. If you are not aware, that is the premier professional society for physical scientists working in the United States. Also it is the main society through which many scientific publications are produced and through which conferences are held almost monthly.

There are two themes in the book: the lobbying by groups who wish to discredit the science for economic reasons, and the science of global warming. The advocates of scientific confusion are similar to those groups that tried to tell us 40 years ago that cigarettes did not cause lung cancer. Eventually the reality is too obvious to refute. This is likely the similar case with global warming. We are still in the early days of the trend where we can measure increases in CO2 and small changes in temperature.

This is a short but easy to read book and it is cross referenced to the web page www.aip.org/history/climate. The book contains a number of notes and references on climate change and history.

In the book Weart explains that contrary to many notions in the popular press the main parameters that cause global warming are fairly well understood. As the earth rotates on its axis, it is warmed by day as it faces the hot sun and then the temperature drops at night as the surface is cooled by thermal radiation losses into cold space. These temperature oscillations and the nature of the radiation balance were first understood by the French scientist Joseph Fourier. These were further clarified by the British scientist and engineer John Tyndall about 150 years ago when he discovered that CO2 and water vapour acted as radiation barrier that would stop energy losses from the earth, and would retain the energy on the surface of the earth. This blanket raises the temperature of the earth and reduces the daily 24 hour cycle variations in temperature (the days are warmer and the nights do not get so cold).

In addition there is a feedback mechanism. If the planet gets a bit too cold, say by a decrease in the CO2 levels, the water vapour is reduced and the planet surface can get even colder. The oscillations can be predicted with some confidence - but not 100% accurately - by computer models. It is clear that the trends are accurate even if scientists cannot predict all the fine details.

The author presents a history of global warming studies in an easy to read style covering the last 200 years. He does not use any mathematical formulas but he does produce scientific data on the earth's temperature and the rise in CO2. He does spend a lot of time discussing the work and the impact of politics and public relations by the polluters. The book is neutral but presents a fairly convincing case that we are in the throes of a climate change that might take many decades to become clearly apparent to everyone. But among the scientists themselves, there is a general consensus in the scientific community that global warming is occurring - contrary to stories in the media that scientists do not agree on global warming.

This is a short (4 star) book and it is a good read and education - highly recommend.The author is a former physicist and well known historian of physics with an interest in the intersection of science and policy. In this book, Weart is interested not only in describing the discovery of anthropogenic global warming but also in offering some analysis of how scientific discovery occurs and how science intersects with policy considerations. The story begins with some of the great names of 19th century science, Fourier, Tyndall, and Arrhenius, the latter being the first to raise the possibility of anthropogenic global warming. What follows is a concise history of relevant climate science in the 20th century. In the process of discovering anthropogenic global warming, researchers had to overcome significant conceptual and practical obstacles. Climate was thought of as constant, almost by definition, changing only very slowly, and driven by forces that made human activities seem puny by comparison. In addition to the considerable difficulties inherent in studying a complex global system and assembling a suitable historical record, a major obstacle was the inter-disciplinary nature of climate research. Because the study of climate wasn't the primary focus of any traditional discipline, it was a stepchild in terms of attracting investigators, funding, and the type of community activity necessary for productive science. As shown well by Weart, progress proceeded in fits and starts with important contributions made by scientists from a wide variety of disciplines, often working in ignorance of relevant work in other disciplines. By the end of the century, however, the prevailing concept of the global climate system had changed markedly with an appreciation not only of its great complexity but also is dynamism and the ability of apparently small perturbations to produce major changes. Weart does a good job of weaving this story into the discovery of strong evidence for anthropogenic global warming and provides a good sketch of the institutional maturation of the field. Weart does a nice job of showing, in a sociological way, how science works and how a scientific community evolves in response to both new findings, controversy, and the impact of policy. A nice example is his brief history of the development and functioning of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Developed to replace more informal organizations for developing a scientific consensus, one of the motives behind the development of the IPCC was that it would function under the auspices of national governments and be controllable by these governments. The structure of the IPCC was democratic, however, and the participants were largely individuals from democratic societies who expected democratic procedures. The result is that the IPCC tends to function as an autonomous, consensus driven body, relatively impervious to the influence of individual national governments or special interests.
This book is something of a polemic, as it was written in part to explain to the general public the science behind concerns about global warming. But this is no ordinary polemic. Like the IPCC reports, it is based on solid science, is carefully crafted, and is quite evenhanded. For individuals who wish more technical information, the author includes references to a number of websites and his own online bibliography that lists the large relevant literature. 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. 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.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
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