Book Title: Computing the Climate: How We Know What We Know About Climate Change
Author: Steve M. Eastbrook
ISBN: 9781107133488
Excerpt: on Google Books
Few of us have read the full 6000 pages or so of the sixth IPPC assessment report. However, it is fair to assume that many more have read this latest version compared to the fifth assessment report, which formed the basis of the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Most likely though, many of us have only read the Synthesise Report, or perhaps just the Summary for Policy Makers. And many, many more have come to understand the content of these reports by participating in the gamified Climate Fresk workshop.
For those of us who aren’t climate scientists, the questions we often ask are:
- How do we know what we know about climate and climate change?
- Why can meteorologists predict weekend weather with decent accuracy, but anything beyond that is seemingly pure guesswork?
- How is all of this connected to climate: both the distant past — think ice ages — and the mid- and long-term future?
- And, most importantly, where is the line between what we know for sure and what we can only estimate with varying degrees of probability?
[Spoiler: The key factor is the timeline. We can know the past because it has already happened. But for the future, we can only outline different possibilities — and how likely they are to unfold depends heavily on what’s happening in the present.]
The Book
Steve Eastbrook takes us through the various aspects that make up modern climate science: the history of early efforts, the scientific models, the software, the mechanics of scientific consensus (and disagreements), and how all these developments have led us to what we know today.
The book begins with four chapters that provide an overview of climate science and its models over the past century, even though these ideas weren’t necessarily called “climate science” back then. We learn about the experiments that were done, why and how they were conducted, what they discovered, and how their findings were interpreted at the time.
These chapters on the world’s first and early climate models are some of the most fascinating parts of the book, revealing several fundamental insights:
- Science is always pragmatic. Limited resources — time, money, technology, and expertise — mean that they must be used effectively.
- Climate change and its human drivers were recognized early on and accepted by the scientific community.
[Comment by the author of this post: Until the fossil fuel industry began to realize the economic impact on their business model …] - Economic and social contexts are essential to understanding and interpreting scientific observations. Some modelling requires considerable “out-of-the-box” thinking to truly reflect reality.
- Reality is complex. The natural system is complex. Models aren’t striving for perfection — they aim for “good enough,” with clear definitions of what that means.
The subsequent chapters take us on a journey through four of the most prominent, well-known, and high-performing climate modelling labs in existence today:
Each of these chapters introduces a key aspect of climate modelling, in addition to the lab itself: the link between weather and climate (Met Office), the need for different models for different components of the climate system (NCAR), the challenges of integrating those models while maintaining precision (IPSL), and how to deal with surprises or unexpected outcomes in order to improve scientific understanding (Max Planck Institute).
The final chapter dives into the “So What”: the problems that still exist within these models, how they’re being addressed, and why it’s crucial for policymakers to fully understand what this book is about:
Climate models tell us what could happen, but not what will happen — and knowing this distinction, and its rationale, is essential for making informed decisions about the future.
In Conclusion
Computing the Climate: How We Know What We Know About Climate Change is a book written for the interested non-scientist: accessible, thoughtful, and well-illustrated. It assumes a certain amount of common sense, but above all, it requires a genuine interest in understanding how climate scientists have worked — and continue to work — over the past century.
It takes us right to the heart of where climate science happens, including anecdotes that highlight the hands-on problem-solving process. This book is well worth reading, not just for its scientific content, but also for how it brings us closer to the real human beings whose perseverance make scientific breakthroughs possible at all.
Video Lecture
