Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast

Great book that helped with UMass Geo 100 level Environmental Change course. The book it’s self was a bit beat up, with some kind of oil stain with in the front cover. However it did not affect the interior of the book at all. Since this is a book, quite literally, about environmental change and the reasons we must do the best that we can for our environment I strongly believe in renting textbooks and this one should stay in circulation. It still has a lot of good life left!As for the book it’s self it is a lot about the math involved in our atmosphere and environmental change. If you are interested in the math of it, and that is complex, this is a wonderful book. However if you are interested in the actual workings of the atmosphere but not the math you can skip over the biggest calculations and still learn an incredible amount.Also make sure you look up the professor who wrote the book, David archer, online and check out the companion series of lectures from the University of Chicago. Each one is short, under seven minutes, and extremely valuable for truly understanding what you’re reading. Also, take it from me as an adult student, it is better to rent any books than to buy the them. None of the textbooks that I kept for my first time in university in the late 90s have I ever looked at again... And if I did I would want the most up to date editions .Save yourself a lot of time, energy, money, and aggravation by renting your books and returning them. You can always rent them again later if you need them! Good luck to us all and please GO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT!

The book is extremely interesting and teaches us all about global warmingI really enjoyed reading this book for one of my courses in college

David Archer brings abstract concepts into concrete terms throughout this text. An entertaining and enjoyable read. The exercises in this text are recommended to help the reader carry away deeper understanding of principles, ideas and applications. Basic science is presented in clear terms and will help the general reader as well as those in other areas of science better understand climate issues. The serious reader is encouraged to take David Archer's course through Coursera. It is a close companion to the materials presented in the text - and it's free. The reader will also learn to use software to model the Earth's transmission spectra under different scenarios along with many other intriguing climate physics models. At whatever the level of interest, the reader will benefit from the presentations in the book, be better informed regarding climate change and better understand the flaws in climate skeptic claims.

After taking a course on Climate Change, I wanted to read and study more about it on my own. I bought this book and haven't regretted it. David Archer begins with a chapter on "Humankind and Climate" and from there goes on to begin Part I "The Greenhouse Effect." Each chapter is followed up with Take Home Points which are statements to review and consider, Study Questions, Further Reading and lastly a series of Exercises.Part II covers "The Carbon Cycle" with three chapters on Carbon on Earth, Fossil Fuels and Energy, and The Perturbed Carbon Cycle. Part III is "The Forecast" which covers, among other things, Potential Climate Impacts." In Part I the author includes a chapter on Weather and Climate, and from my own experience with people who don't believe in Climate Change, many don't know the difference between the two, so a good discussion is necessary, as well as mankind's part in the problem.The book also covers numerical modeling and has colorplates of maps of climate model annual mean temperature, maps of climate model temperature changes from the year 2000 and various maps of climate model precipitation."Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast" by David Archer is a textbook for undergraduates who are non-science majors, but I am able to follow it myself after a thorough course on Climate Change that went into numerical modeling in much more detail than this book does. It is a good book to help understand the problem.The book takes into consideration the roles of economics, population and land use in Global Warming and considers some solutions.Highly recommended.

This is an excellent and concise review of the science behind global warming. I appreciated that the author provides online access to lots of different models that allow you to play with the data yourself. This really helps with understanding the forces at work and how they're interconnected. It also gives you a sense for where our gaps in knowledge are, and how uncertainties affect our predictions of future climate change.One important note: I used the online version of the book, and found that the links the models are all broken because the URLs have changed since the book was published. If you find that this hasn't been fixed, Google the names of the models and you should be able to find them.

I started reading this book as part of a master class in environmental science. I soon noticed that the book was much more technical than expected. Too little explanation is given for the interpretation of the graphs (example: figure 4-8). The calculation is not always clear either, so the results of formula 3.5 deviate from what is stated in table 3.1. and you never get +15 degrees with the data. On the other hand, the book as a whole provides an insight into how to arrive at climate models.

This is the best introduction to global warming that I have found for thinking people who are not climate scientists themselves. Written by an expert in the field, it shows far better scientific reasoning than the popular book by Al Gore. At the same time, it is a university textbook meant for non-majors, and the author does his best to summarize the science and make it accessible. The book is not perfect --- a few details here and there are misstated and a few of the figures are cheap-looking --- but it is great. In fact, it's a good way to learn some important basics of chemistry, physics, and earth science even if you aren't thinking about global warming.

Very readable text book. Straightforward and to the point.One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven.

David Archer's book "Global warming - Understanding the Forcast", his free online video lectures at University of Chicago and the online interactive models he offers for free (particularly ISAM, see the graphical ISAM interface in the first figure above) have been my prime sources of information for preparing a high school class on the climate crisis (I'm a physicist by training).In particular, throughout its Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC AR5) the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) frequently compares the results of a multi-model ensemble of Earth System Models used in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) on the one hand and the reduced complexity Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse-gas Induced Climate Change (MAGICC) on the other hand. David Archer's book, lectures and online model ISAM helped me understand a rather important issue: climate scientists distinguish between (*) the probability of a reduced complexity model result (the curve in the above second figure) and (*) the number of CMIP model computations delivering that result (represented by a plume in the second of the above figures).

Plutôt un cours minimum sur le climat. Je préfère l'ouvrage de F.W. Taylor ("Elementary climate physics"), certes un peu plus matheux mais plus complet, abordant notamment dans le dernier chapitre les climats planétaires (ce qui ne peut que réjouir un astronome !). Par ailleurs le livre "Global warming" coûte plus de 100€ pour 203 pages ! Faites le calcul à la page !

LLEGÓ BIEN

Ce bouquin est très intéressant. Je l'ai utilisé comme complément au MOOC Coursera du même David Archer. Très utile pour arriver à comprendre tous les aspects de la recherche, même récente, sur les changements climatiques. Beaucoup de graphes explicatifs et un style simple mais précis.