A Vast Machine

Paul Edwards's 2010 history of how climate knowledge is made from models and data together, from early weather observation to global climate simulation.

Edwards answers the claim that climate science is only simulation by showing that there is no global data without models: even satellite observations have to pass through data models before they say anything about the planet as a whole. The book traces how scientists learned to measure the atmosphere, how they reconstructed its past from scattered and inconsistent records, and how they came to project its future, treating the whole as a single knowledge infrastructure.

For a twin builder it is the deepest treatment of the relation between a model and the data it claims to represent. The argument that observation and simulation are inseparable, and that the infrastructure that joins them is where the real work happens, applies to a twin of a watershed as much as to one of the climate.

Cover via Open Library.