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

From 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.

From Booklist
It sounds like the outline for the next movie by Roland Emmerich, director of The Day After and 2012: in the near future, our world’s weather has drastically changed as a result of today’s environmental issues (including global warming). Floods wash over major cities. Coral reefs dissolve from supersaturated salt water. The Arctic permafrost melts, releasing huge amounts of methane gas into the atmosphere. Using climate-model projections to forecast tomorrow’s (potential) weather, the author takes us through the next 40-odd years, painting a rather gloomy picture of what’s in store for our planet and offering some suggestions about what we can do today to avoid catastrophe. Some readers might dismiss the book as a manifestation of Chicken Little syndrome, but others, noting the author’s calm, reasonable tone and sensible extrapolations from present-day phenomena, will no doubt conclude that this is a woman to whom attention must be paid. –David Pitt