Computing the Climate

How We Know What We Know About Climate Change

Steve M. Easterbrook

How do we know that climate change is an emergency? How did the scientific community reach this conclusion all but unanimously, and what tools did they use to do it? This book tells the story of climate models, tracing their history from nineteenth-century calculations on the effects of greenhouse gases to modern Earth system models that integrate the atmosphere, the oceans, and the land using the full resources of today’s most powerful supercomputers. Drawing on the author’s extensive visits to the world’s top climate research labs, this accessible, non-technical book shows how computer models help to build a more complete picture of Earth’s climate system. Computing the Climate is ideal for anyone who has wondered where the projections of future climate change come from – and why we should believe them.

Steve M. Easterbrook is Director of the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto, where he teaches courses on environmental decisionmaking, systems thinking, and climate literacy. He received a Ph.D. in Computing from Imperial College London in 1991. In the 1990s he served as lead scientist at NASA’s Katherine Johnson IV&V Facility in West Virginia, where he worked on software verification for the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. He has been a consultant for the European and Canadian Space Agencies, and a visiting scientist at many climate research labs in the US and Europe.

UK publication July 2023

US publication July 2023

350 Pages 9781107589926

Paperback

£24.99 | $29.99 USD | $33.95 CAD

At a glance

• Written in a clear, non-technical narrative style that makes climate science accessible to a wide audience

• Provides a big-picture overview, showing how various scientific discoveries link together to better our understanding of climate change

• Illustrates how key discoveries in climate science were made, linking technical work to its broader social and historical context

• Describes the author’s personal journey into understanding the people and ideas behind climate models and making his own contributions

DAVID STEFAN DODDINGTON