A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Infrastructures)

Edwards, Paul N.

ISBN 10: 0262013924 / ISBN 13: 9780262013925

Verlag: The MIT Press, 2010

Beschreibung

Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 0262013924-4-22347963

Bibliografische Details

• Titel: A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Infrastructures)
• Verlag: The MIT Press
• Erscheinungsjahr: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN-10: 0262013924
• ISBN-13: 9780262013925
• Einband: Hardcover
• Zustand: Fair

Über diesen Titel

Inhaltsangabe

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.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Paul N. Edwards is Professor in the School of Information and the Department of History 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.