Rapp D. Assessing climate change. Temperatures, solar radiation and heat balance

Third Edition. — Heidelberg, New York: Springer, 2014. — 843 pp.In this book, I have investigated a large body of technical data relevant to global climate change, approaching each element with necessary (but hopefully neutral) scientific skepticism. As Einstein said: "The goal is to be as simple as possible, but not simpler." Thus, by necessity, this book is quite technical, but hopefully still quite readable. The essential questions are:
(1) How well has the world monitored near-surface temperatures of the 30% land and 70% ocean areas on the Earth during the past 120 years or more, and how well can we characterize the changes in climate over that time span?
(2) What are the utility and significance of a single global average temperature?
(3) How has the Earth's climate varied over the past Ice Ages, the Holocene, the last millennium, and the past century, and what can we infer about "natural" variability of the climate prior to industrialization by humankind?
(4) How reliable are proxies for historical temperatures? What do we really know about past temperature variations? Is the hockey stick version of millennium temperatures credible, in which temperatures were relatively flat for 2,000 years prior to a sudden rise in the 20th century?
(5) How does the current global-warming trend compare with past fluctuations in the Earth's climate, and what is the likelihood that the warming trend we are experiencing now is primarily just another in a series of natural climate fluctuations as opposed to a direct result of human production of greenhouse gases?Long-term climate change.
Temperatures during the past few millennia.
Temperatures in the past century.
Global scares, subjective science, and climatologists.
Variability of the Sun.
The Earth's heat balance and the greenhouse effect.
Anthropogenic influences on climate change.
Impacts of global warming.
Global climate change and public policy.
Final remarks.
Appendix.