Introduction to Modern Climate Change, second edition

摘要

The first thing you notice about the second edition of Andrew Dessler's textbook is that one of the opening sections in Chapter 1 is headed "Why you should believe this textbook." That should alert you that this book deals with a subject that has been, to put it mildly, the subject of somewhat contentious public discussion. It is to Dessler's credit that he confronts the subject of "climate skepticism" head-on, in the first 10 pages of the book, and sets out his arguments as to why the expert consensus (in this case the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the IPCC) should be trusted. He also (and this is a subject he returns to at considerable length later in the book) draws parallels between the campaign of the tobacco industry to disrupt public health policies on smoking with the methodologies approached by those who dispute anthropogenic climate disruption. It is thus obvious, right from the outset, that this is a text that makes its position on both the science and the implications of the science clear — as per the introduction in which the author states "my strategy in this book is to simply explain the science and then lay-out the possible solutions and trade-offs among them."