While I am a certifiable idiot for not realizing it earlier, it transpires that the Geography and the Environment Library on Mansfield Road has a treasure trove of thesis related books. In five minutes flat, I registered to use the library and take out their books. I now have an elegant stack of books on the history of climate change: just the sort I have been looking for, while despairing about the gap in my bibliography. Once I have finished Spencer Weart’s The Discovery of Global Warming, read John Hardy’s Climate Change: Causes, Effects, and Solutions, tracked down a few of their sources, re-read Northern Lights Against POPs, and done the same for that, I will be ready to re-draft my second chapter in a far superior form.
The library itself is also quite a welcoming place. I will link a photo of it here, once I have the chance to put one online. The main room, has a very attractive asymmetrically gabled roof. It is quiet, smells faintly of wood, and has high resolution monitors and blazing fast internet access. The maps on the wall, skylights, and windows overlooking the Balliol Sports Grounds are also reasons for which I am considering making this another thesis base of operations, in addition to Church Walk and the High Street Starbucks.
Weart’s climate site shares many of my interests and methods:
The Discovery of Global Warming
This hyperlinked set of 30 essays, the only one of its kind, explains from many angles the century of scientific and social challenges that made the world’s scientists conclude that climate change is very likely to become a severe problem. With photos, charts, bibliography, links. Download site | Buy CD
This looks pretty excellent, as well:
Reflections on the Scientific Process, as Seen in Climate Studies
simon singh’s The Code Book might be the perfect thing for you to read recreationally.
The Discovery of Global Warming
A hypertext history of how scientists came to (partly) understand what people are doing to cause climate change.
This Website created by Spencer Weart supplements his much shorter book, which tells the history of climate change research as a single story. On this Website you will find a more complete history in dozens of essays on separate topics, updated annually.