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 Professor of Information and 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.