The Warming Papers

Recently, a number of key scientific papers published over the last roughly two centuries dealing with climate change were collected and reviewed and then published with the title The Warming Papers. The Warming Papers is not just an additional book about climate change. Browsing through the book is quite a unique experience. David Archer and Raymond Pierrehumbert have made a collection of key scientific papers on climate change published over the last two centuries. The papers were selected on the basis of their scientific importance in the field of global warming forecast and the consequences. According to the editors these papers contain the big ideas. The unique value of this collection concerns not only the papers as such, but also the interpretation of the work by the editors. This includes a description of the context in which the paper was written at that time, a comparison with other relevant (recent) publications, and separate editor notes. This guiding turns out to be very useful, since many papers were written in a different time with different scientific knowledge and assumptions than today. This book is not meant to be read like a novel, as it is a collection of scientific papers. And some of the papers may be hard to understand, as the editors frankly admit. But the guiding, in which the editors’ enthusiasm is noticeable, enhances the readability. The collection contains a total of 32 papers, divided into two main subjects: Climate Physics (17 papers) and the Carbon Cycle (15 papers). The collection starts with the pioneering work of Fourier about the discovery of the greenhouse effect (1824) and ends at 2004 with a paper on tropospheric temperature trends. The total number of papers introduced is, however, more than these 32 highlighted papers. As part of their guiding, the editors introduce additional work by other scientists. As with all great papers, the works build on previous findings. For example, Fourier built on the work of William Herschel (1801) and Saussure (1740–1799). The editors introduced the work of Saussure in a separate box. There is some reason why the editors end their selection at 2004. One needs a certain amount of time to define a paper as classical to allow other studies to build on the work. Another aspect is the exponential increase in scientific papers on climate change after approximately 2004, which complicates the selection process. An illustration of this increase is shown in the editorial correspondence by Grieneisen and Zhang in Nature of Climate Change (Grieneisen and Zhang, 2011). I believe that the editors were well aware of the fact that there is no such thing as a complete overview. I can imagine it is not an easy job to create a representative selection out of a huge number of publications. I refer to a quote from the famous French scientist Blaise Pascal: ‘I write you a long letter, since I have no time for a short one’. It certainly would have been easier by simply downloading existing collections of climate change-related papers, which you can find on the internet. One example of such a list is www.aip.org/ history/climate/index.htm. However, the poor reader would be left with a huge number of papers, some of them not strongly linked to climate change. Such a list is certainly useful for many reasons; it is less meaningful for those who seek a comprehensive collection of the most important papers. And perhaps more important than the presence of a meaningful filter is an explanation of the context of the paper. Although filtering is necessary, introducing a personal favour may be a disadvantage, since there is no clear