Book review: The warming papers

The warming papers: The scientific foundation for the climate change forecast

Editors: David Archer and Raymond Pierrehumbert / Wiley-Blackwell / Paperback: £37.50 / ISBN: 978–1-4051–9616–1

Most people with an interest in the impact of greenhouse gases on the Earth’s temperature will have heard of the physicist Joseph Fourier, who is generally credited with discovering the “greenhouse effect” – basically, the natural process by which the atmosphere traps some of the Sun’s energy.

This book is a compendium of the classic scientific papers – including Fourier’s 1827 paper – from the past 184 years that provide the foundation for our understanding of global warming.

As well as Fourier’s paper postulating a greenhouse effect, the book also includes Svante Arrhenius’s 1896 paper on the influence of carbonic acid in the air on the temperature of the ground – in which the Swedish physicist is the first to speculate that changes in the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.

Fascinating, but only of interest if you want to really understand how the science of global warming has evolved.