The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

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Overview
Editorial Reviews
Product Details
Meet the Author
Table of Contents

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Overview

Dr. Heidi Cullen, one of the world's foremost climatologists and environmental journalists, offers a new way of viewing the climate-change phenomenon, not as some future event but as something happening right now in our own backyard. In this groundbreaking, provocative work, Dr. Cullen combines the latest scientific research with state-of-the-art climate-model projections to create climate-change scenarios for seven of the most at-risk locations around the globe.

From the Central Valley of California, where coming droughts will jeopardize the entire state's water supply, to New York City, whose infrastructure is extremely vulnerable to even a relatively weak Category 3 hurricane, to Greenland, where warmer temperatures will give access to mineral wealth buried beneath ice sheets for millennia, Cullen illustrates how, if left unabated, climate change will transform every corner of the world by midcentury—and no two regions will be affected in quite the same way.

Editorial Reviews

Associated Press Staff

“[Cullen] accepts weather as a local matter, just as Tip O’Neill, longtime speaker of the House of Representatives, proclaimed all politics to be local...The Weather of the Future,” uses a broad itinerary to illustrate the threats she perceives.”

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“This is a woman to whom attention must be paid.”

More Reviews (4) Fewer Reviews

New Scientist

“Heidi Cullen’s beautifully crafted study provides the human detail that has been missing from most reports on climate science…This book sets a new benchmark for accessible writing on the likely weather of the future.”

New York Post

“In an accessible way, [Cullen] details the Earth’s climate history and forecasts what might happen if we’re not more careful.”

Michiko Kakutani

Although Weather of the Future sounds like an exercise in speculation, Ms. Cullen grounds her harrowing predictions—extrapolations, really—in "the best available science" derived from an array of climate models, environmental data and interviews with scientists. And her forecasts actually turn out to be an armature for discussing the fallout of climate change (from rising sea levels to more extreme weather) in an accessible, tactile fashion and for examining existing liabilities in various regions and cities, like overstretched infrastructure and dwindling water supplies.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

This engrossing study predicts global warming scenarios for seven hot spots around the world--and evaluates the responses of communities, governments, and international organizations. Cullen, a climatologist, notes that "just as our brain is hardwired to perceive threats that are most immediate to us, we are hardwired to devote more energy to caring about the weather than to caring about the climate," and that "by the time you see it in the weather... it's too late." With some ecosystems, such as the overtaxed Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which the entire state of California depends on for water, "people would rather simply hope for a happy ending." In contrast, in the Arctic, the Inuit are responding to climate change and incorporating technology into their traditional hunting methods, and New York City "has decided to fix the climate bug now" with its Climate Change Adaptation Task Force. Despite the worry among scientists that humans will follow "the woolly mammoth, the symbol of a climate that no longer exists," the book presents a surprisingly optimistic view of humanity's determination to come to terms with a daunting future. (Aug.)

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780061726941
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 7/19/2011
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 352
Sales rank: 210,288
Product dimensions: 5.20 (w) x 7.90 (h) x 1.00 (d)

Meet the Author

Dr. Heidi Cullen is a senior research scientist with Climate Central, a nonprofit climate news and research organization, and a visiting lecturer at Princeton University.

List of Maps xi

Introduction xiii

Part I Your Weather Is Your Climate

1 Climate and Weather Together 3

2 Seeing Climate Change in Our Past 12

3 The Science of Prediction 31

4 Extreme Weather Autopsies and the Forty-Year Forecast 50

Part II The Weather of the Future

5 The Sahel, Africa 63

6 The Great Barrier Reef, Australia 89

7 Central Valley, California 115

8 The Arctic, Part One: Inuit Nunaat, Canada 149

9 The Arctic, Part Two: Greenland 173

10 Dhaka, Bangladesh 197

11 New York, New York 227

Epilogue: The Trillionth Ton 261

Appendix 1 United States Climate Change Almanac 273

Appendix 2 New York Statistics 297

Appendix 3 The World's Most Vulnerable Places 299

Notes 303

Acknowledgments 313

Index 317

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 3.5

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Anonymous

Posted May 11, 2012

This is a good novel but it is very one sided and negative. It l

This is a good novel but it is very one sided and negative. It looks only at worst case scenarios and is hopeless. Not a bad read but go into it knowing that according to this author we are doomed.
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AceBitbucket

Posted August 12, 2011

Highly Recommended

Excellent discussion of the practical aspects of global warming. Using specific locations and examining the consequences of climate change is more engaging than model discussions.
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Anonymous

Posted August 3, 2011

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Posted August 6, 2011

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