In an effort to recommend suitable books about climate science I found myself to have only the few listed below, not all of which are exactly text books.

Are there books that you would recommend to the general reader on the science of climate?

Climate Science and Climate Change

“World Climate — the weather, the environment and man”, TF Gaskell and Martin Morris, 1979

“The Discovery of Global Warming”, Spencer R. Weart, 2003

“The Weather Makers — Our Changing Climate and What It Means for a Life on Earth”, Tim Flannery, 2005

“The Madhouse Effect — How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy”, Michael E Mann and Tom Toles

Environment, more generally ...

“The Ages of Gaia”, James Lovelock, 1988

“The Unnatural World — The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age”, David Biello, 2016

I used to have a copy of the following book, written in 1961 that may be of interest to those with an interest in the history of these things. It describes Richardson's attempt to predict weather by solving the partial differential equations. He did it by hand in about the time of World War 1. If I remember correctly, it took him several year to compute the weather a day in advance. It did not work out well for reasons now understood, but the results were that weather moved at the speed of sound and at right angles to the directions actually experienced. This was discouraging, but with the advent of digital computers, these methods have greater applicability now. By now, I mean 1961.


Numerical weather analysis and prediction
Thompson, Philip Duncan
Published by Macmillan, New York, 1961

https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/numerical-weather-analysis-prediction/

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[Jean-David Breyer wrote:] ... Numerical weather analysis and prediction
Thompson, Philip Duncan
Published by Macmillan, New York, 1961

Thanks, that looks like an interesting one. It’s easy to forget how hard the analytical approach was compared with the computer crunching (which is still not easy).

If I remember correctly, the problem is that sound waves do flow straight down the pressure gradients at the speed of sound. This is obvious and no surprise. And the model equations must reflect that reality. The problem is that the weather phenomena take up large area of the planet, so the actions of the Coriolus effect must be taken care of. The model did this, but one of the problems is that the weather phenomena effects are lost in round-off error, and those are the very effects that must be studied. I am sure current weather analysts (not routine TV weather announcers) know all this by now, and have methods to diddle the models so that the effects of sound are neglected so that the calculations emphasize the solutions appropriate to the weather (or climate, for that matter). But all I do is run climateprediction; I am neither an expert, nor even a student, of this stuff.

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