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

This book seems little different than the rantings of a Monday morning,arriving late, college professor, suffering from a hangover, who forgot his lecture notes and even his place in the course syllabus, who decides to talk over the heads of his students about anything in general and nothing in particular because he does not know that they will appreciate the difference.An example, "I intend the notion of knowledge infrastructure to signal parallels with other infrastructures, such as those of communication, transport, and energy distribution. Yet this is no mere analogy or metaphor. It is a precise, literal description of the sociotechnical supports that invariably undergird facts and well-accepted theories."Imagine 439 pages of this drivel!He does not realistically appraise evidence regarding "human caused global warming" but does claim that computer model output constitutes data! How MIT could publish this is beyond me!(added Jan 9, 2011)Steven Forth doubts that I have read the book. Janet withdrew her comment so I will never know what it said. Mats Frick says my writing is an "obvious attempt to divert potential readers from gaining insight into climate science." Robert Welcyng appreciates my comments. Steven K wants me to exercise my mind. Elliot Zais says that I am not up to the task of reading the book and compares me to Beck and Limbaugh. Daniel Yee suggests I am a lay reader. Rblan comes to my defense.I am surprised that I need to give my C.V. here but perhaps it is important. I hold a BS in biology/chemistry, a Washington State teacher's certificate, 42 additional college credits in marine biology and ecology, and a master's degree in Educational Communication. I even took a meteorology class. I taught for a third of a century, mostly in a suburban school district north of Seattle and two years of that time in Truk High School, E. Caroline Islands, Micronesia; two years traveling the state of WA for the Pacific Science Center bringing a portable van science program to elementary schools, followed by substituting in a private religious school for a chemistry teacher on leave, and finished my career teaching for Seattle Schools Home School Resource Center where parents sent their home schooled children to take a single class such as biology or chemistry.I have taught biology, marine biology, chemistry, physics, photography, mathematics, earth science, environmental science, and a few other courses I was unprepared for. In one way or another I have taught every level from kindergarten to college level. That has made me a semi expert in converting complicated science into simple terms for the student. I have always considered myself a liberal green-oriented environmentalist. A few years ago I heard a local radio personality decry human-caused global warming and it made my blood boil. I had seen Gore's movie and was 100% behind it. Since I was retired I decided to research the literature on global warming. After I had read more than 30 volumes, used the U of Washington campus to research and follow up on well over a thousand research papers and read who-knows-how-many web blogs, I contacted the radio personality and apologized for an earlier email where I had said that he did not know what he was talking about.There is a profound problem with the "consensus opinion" on global warming. They will not release the information about the science. They will tell us that all the important scientists agree, but they do not release the bulk of the science for us to see. For the last year I have tried to write a high school textbook that will give both arguments for and against human-caused global warming, the ideas of science both for and against, how-much and how-long. My thought was that a teacher could present the material without taking sides and let the students discuss, take sides, argue and learn about science as a human endeavor. The first thing they should learn is that science is never a consensus for very long and different opinions are what make it great. Unfortunately much of the available literature is political and not science."A Vast Machine..." is completely worthless for my purpose. The author does not even know the basics of communication. He does not explain; he obfuscates. Save your money!

The Author revisits the definitions of infrastructure and data at depths that I personally have not encountered before and his articulations have considerably enriched my understanding of both these concepts and helped me better perceive their roles in several fields: infrastructure in the area of networking and data in the field of climate science. Having read this book I now perceive infrastructure as including perceptual structures that influence and constrain our perceptions and I understand data as being generated through perceptual processes.The authors portrayal of the meteorological weather forecasting networks enables the perception of their growing across the face of earth and linking up to form a global network that generated the World Meteorological Organization in 1950 and the Inter governmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988 gives a clear portrayal of the rising of a Global Network of scientists capable of perceiving planetary processes and providing the human species with strategic guidance.These perceptions and their articulation are nested in a bed of very deep and detailed information regarding data, data generating methodologies and processes as well as significant events that every serious student of climate sciences will benefit from familiarizing themselves with.

Do you or anyone you know want to understand the current "debate" over climate change and our contribution to it? And to comprehend the evolution of climate science, data collection, and computer modeling that underlies this, and indeed must underly any sensible discussion of a "global economy" and other "global" developments. This book is a lucid, intellectually thrilling and magisterial account of how climate science has evolved over the past 150 years, showing how early visionaries and decades of dedicated work on collecting information on the "vast machine" of weather and climate resulted in a "vast machine" of computer-based understanding was created, has transformed the answers to fundamental questions of "what we mean" and "how do we know." No one should graduate from college without reading this book, and no one should consider him/herself conversant with the current terms of political debate without reading this book. The Economist listed this among its best books of 2010. It should be on a list of best of the past decade--and most important!

Paul Edwards has done a great public service by writing A Vast Machine. By reading this book you will come to understand and appreciate the enormous effort that has been put into gathering weather and climate data and processing it to give us insight into what to expect. You'll learn about making "data global" and then making "global data." You'll be able to answer critics who say "It's just modeling. It's not real." They don't know what they're talking about. You will. What we need to do about climate change including global warming is far too important to be decided on the basis on mindless 30-second sound bites or well-paid talk show hosts telling their listeners not to pay any heed to the thousands of scientists who actually know something about the problem. Reading A Vast Machine will require some effort, but you can skip some of the more technical parts without losing the main message. I strongly recommend it.

This book had a lot of good information. Unfortunately there was a lot of repetitive wording where you had to skim through because you already knew what he was talking about. The technical information was not too difficult for someone with a couple of semesters of College algebra. But I would still recommend this book because overall there was a lot of good information.

Pretty heavy reading, but well worth it if you wish to understand the relationship between meteorology, climate science, and data collection and processing. All three have evolved together and only as computer processing power has become significant have we been able to gather really clear pictures of how complex Earth's environment is and gain a more profound understanding of how it works and how our human activity influences it.

This is an excellent summary of the evolution of the science behind weather and climate.Reading and understanding of this history, gives the lie to those climate change 'denialists' (- for want of a better word) who carry on about inadequate or fudged data, or how computer models of the behaviour of the earth's atmosphere produce rubbish, or at least misleading results.h