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A review by luisvilla
Computing the Climate: How We Know What We Know About Climate Change by Steve M. Easterbrook
4.0
This is a very solid attempt to make a pretty dry, technical, *important* topic interesting and accessible. In short, how do we “know” what climate models tell us (and what they can’t tell us) about the future of our climate?
Among other things, it goes pretty deep on:
- the history of climate analysis - very interesting for anyone who likes a good popular history of science!
- deep on the techniques - admittedly even my eyes glazed over here from time to time, but skimmable
- deep on the quality assurance processes that make sure it is all correct - I found this entrancing but I am a former quality assurance engineer!
I definitely recommend this for anyone in software who is curious about the software engineering parts of climatology. In particular, software developers will appreciate interesting observations on how codebases evolve over time, what testing even means at this scale, etc.
For non-developers, this may be somewhat frustrating - the author is clearly trying to make this esoteric topic accessible to a general audience but, as someone deep in the weeds myself, it is hard for me to know whether or not he succeeds.
Among other things, it goes pretty deep on:
- the history of climate analysis - very interesting for anyone who likes a good popular history of science!
- deep on the techniques - admittedly even my eyes glazed over here from time to time, but skimmable
- deep on the quality assurance processes that make sure it is all correct - I found this entrancing but I am a former quality assurance engineer!
I definitely recommend this for anyone in software who is curious about the software engineering parts of climatology. In particular, software developers will appreciate interesting observations on how codebases evolve over time, what testing even means at this scale, etc.
For non-developers, this may be somewhat frustrating - the author is clearly trying to make this esoteric topic accessible to a general audience but, as someone deep in the weeds myself, it is hard for me to know whether or not he succeeds.