---
id: media/a-vast-machine
about:
  label: A Vast Machine
  description: >-
    Paul Edwards's 2010 history of how climate knowledge is made from models and
    data together, from early weather observation to global climate simulation.
  tags:
    - climate
    - models
    - data
    - history
    - infrastructure
  depiction: cover.jpg
book:
  authors:
    - Paul N. Edwards
  publisher: MIT Press
  year: 2010
  isbn: '9780262013925'
  url: 'https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15315933W'
domains:
  - climate
relations:
  - predicate: made_by
    target: people/paul-edwards
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: >-
        A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of
        Global ... - Paul N. Edwards - Google Books
      url: 'https://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN9780262013925'
    - title: 'Open Library: A vast machine'
      url: 'https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15315933W'
  created: '2026-10-17'
  reviewed: '2026-10-17'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
[Edwards](/people/paul-edwards/) answers the claim that climate science is only simulation by showing that there is no global data without models. Even satellite observations pass through data models before they say anything about the planet as a whole. The book traces how scientists learned to measure the atmosphere, reconstructed its past from scattered and inconsistent records, and came to project its future. Edwards treats the whole as a single knowledge infrastructure.

The book is about the relation between a model and the data it claims to represent. Edwards argues that observation and simulation cannot be separated, and that the work happens in the infrastructure joining the two. That holds for a twin of a watershed as much as for one of the climate.

Cover via Open Library.