Beyond Global Warming explores some of the applications of circulation models and numerical experiments to understanding climate change, roughly in the order they were developed historically. It doesn't attempt to describe the state of the art in climate modelling, but explains how relatively simple models have been used to probe aspects of global warming.

Manabe and Broccoli keep things fairly simple, but this is not a popular work. The reader is expected to already know how a circulation model works, for example, and to understand terms such as "paramterization of sub-grid-scale processes". So Beyond Global Warming will be most useful for those who already have some background in climate science and want a different perspective on numerical modelling; the authors played a leading role in much of the work involved, so it may also interest historians of science.

Chapters cover the earliest greenhouse studies by Arrhenius and Callendar, simple one-dimensional models of radiative-convective equilibrium, the first general circulation models, early numerical experiments into seasonal variability and polar amplification, estimation of the climate sensitivity, and modelling of the last glacial maximum. Then, turning to the oceans and water, there are chapters on coupled models and their use in global warming experiments and studies of the Atlantic and the Southern Ocean, longer time-scale processes involving the deep ocean, and the effects of global warming on precipitation and soil moisture.

December 2020

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