Recently I got into a heated-email exchange with my future brother-in-law regarding climate change (he hates Mr. Gore and thinks Anthropogenic GW is a vast left-wing conspiracy, more or less). I've spent some time researching the web and have gotten some great information.
The one thing I haven't found is a trusted web resource on climate modeling for 'advanced-ish' laypeople, especially focusing on an intro to radiative heat transfer in climate modeling (with basic equations and a picture of the important components/mechanisms in play).
I've discovered RealClimate.org, an outstanding and trustworthy resource, but I'm looking for something a little more textbook-ish on this matter. Does anyone have any thoughts/links? I'm trying to stick with free online content.
Thanks!
UPDATE [2/21/06]: Hooray, I found a great resource thanks to the great folks (erm better put, climate/physical scientists) over at realclimate.org. At Raymond Pierrehumbert's homepage, he has a link to his latest draft on a climate science text. Upon a 2-min scrolling skim of this ~200 page PDF, this looks to be exactly what I was looking for...a textbook!
It appears that one needs some exposure to Ordinary Differential Equations, General Physics, and General Chemistry to be able to follow along on even a high-level take (I hope I can).
There may be future, more current drafts, so one needs to check his homepage for the latest link (the PDF link may become outdated sometime in the future, but probably not for awhile).
Thank you to all the Kossacks for your information, links, and commentary!!