Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I The Past

  1. Deducing Weather: The Dawn of Computing

  2. Predicting Weather: The Butterfly and the Tornado

  3. The Greenhouse Effect: Goldilocks and the Three Planets

  4. Deducing Climate: Smagorinsky’s Laboratory

  5. Predicting Climate: Butterflies in the Greenhouse

  6. The Ozone Hole: Black Swan at the Polar Dawn

  7. Global Warming: From Gown to Town

Part II The Present

  1. Occam’s Razor: The Reduction to Simplicity

  2. Constraining Climate: A Conservative View of Modeling

  3. Tuning Climate: A Comedy of Compensating Errors

  4. Occam’s Beard: The Emergence of Complexity

  5. The Hansen Paradox: The Red Queen’s Race of Climate Modeling

  6. The Rumsfeld Matrix: Degrees of Knowledge

  7. Lost in Translation

  8. Taking Climate Models Seriously, Not Literally

Part III The Future

  1. Moore’s Law: To Exascale and Beyond

  2. Machine Learning: The Climate Imitation Game

  3. Geoengineering: Reducing the Fever

  4. Pascal’s Wager: Hedging Our Climate Bets

  5. Moonwalking into the Future

Epilogue