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

Global warming skeptics often fall back on the argument that the scientific case forglobal warming is all model predictions, nothing but simulation; they warn us that we need to waitfor real data, "sound science." In A Vast Machine Paul Edwards has newsfor these skeptics: without models, there are no data. Today, no collection of signals orobservations -- even from satellites, which can "see" the whole planet with a singleinstrument -- 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 andinnovative history of how scientists learned to understand the atmosphere -- to measure it, traceits past, and model its future.

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.