Comments on: Fixing Climate

By: Ice Age â€” Hot Topic

Ice Age â€” Hot Topic — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 18:24:49 +0000

[...] we are storing up, as a number of books reviewed on Hot Topic make clear, including Broeckerâ€™s Fixing Climate, Wardâ€™s Under a Green Sky, Turneyâ€™s Ice, Mud and Blood and Archerâ€™s The Long Thaw. Â But in a [...]

By: More than dreaming â€” Hot Topic

More than dreaming â€” Hot Topic — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:04:41 +0000

[...] review of Broecker and Kunzig’s book Fixing Climate drew attention to the work of Klaus Lackner, a [...]

By: Gareth

Gareth — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 08:57:09 +0000

There's a nice overview of Broecker's career, prompted by a recent award, at Climate Matters.

By: StephenR

StephenR — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:28:10 +0000

Probably a bit less comprehensive, but adding the ‘human face’ (i.e. ”the excitement”) of such discoveries sounds like a new angle…

By: Bryan Walker

Bryan Walker — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:14:31 +0000

Stephen, I haven’t read Spencer Weart’s book, but I do know his supplementary website history of the same title. His section there on past climate cycles and ice ages opens with mention of 19th century field studies in the Swiss Alps. Fixing Climate has a short narrative section of six or seven pages describing the people – Parraudin and Venetz, then Charpentier and Agassiz â€“ and what they believed they had discovered. One of the interests of reading Fixing Climate is in the way it tries to picture some of the excitement of those who first realise something which hasnâ€™t been understood before.

By: StephenR

StephenR — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 20:21:47 +0000

You call it a:

…highly readable narrative of how the modern scientific understanding of climate change has developed since it dawned on a few 19th century observers that there was evidence in the Swiss mountains of vast areas of past glaciation…

In that sense, could you say how it compares with Spencer Weart’s The Discovery of Global Warming ?