The Change in the Weather: People, Weather and the Science of Climate - Hardcover

Stevens, William K.

3.45

11 ratings by Goodreads

9780385320122: The Change in the Weather: People, Weather and the Science of Climate

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385320124 ISBN 13: 9780385320122

Publisher: Delacorte Press, 1999

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Is something going on with the weather?

A record-setting heat wave that just won't release its blistering grip. Balmy winter weeks followed by a sudden crippling snowstorm. Torrential rainfalls of rising frequency and force, deluging areas untouched by flood for decades. And coast-to-coast, a virtually endless parade of dramatically televised weather disasters--each seemingly more extreme than the last.

Examining today's headline-making questions through the authoritative lens of science and history, New York Times science reporter William K. Stevens's The Change in the Weather offers a definitive look at the science of climatic change. He introduces us to the international community of scientists leading the effort to determine whether a new era of climate has already dawned, one in which the extreme will become increasingly commonplace in an ever-warming world. From the impact of our own behavior on the delicate balance that keeps our climate hospitable to the degree to which we're too late to do anything about it, the answers and their implications could not be more profound.

How did we get here? How bad is it? How much worse will it get? How dramatically will it change life as we know it, and how quickly? The climate-science community's newfound consensus--that the earth is indeed getting warmer, and human activity is at least partially at fault--remains a topic of fierce debate, and Stevens helps us understand both the science and politics we'll need to know in the coming years.

Charting the "grand drama" that began with the formation of the planet and its atmosphere billions of years ago, Stevens reveals the patterns of extreme climate change that have always characterized earth history. He explores the inextricable link between the fate of humanity and the climate--from the shaping of human evolution to the devastation of entire civilizations--and our efforts to make sense of these vast forces beyond our control. And he both shows us these forces at work today, as manifested in melting Alaskan glaciers or distressingly brown New England autumns, and offers an informed speculative glimpse at what may be in store for the end of our new century.

As we enter the third millennium amid unfounded predictions of apocalyptic weather disaster, the very real debate about our planet's fate rages on beneath the clamor. An armchair scientist's guide to the science of climate--past, present, and future--The Change in the Weather is an eye-opening and authoritative exploration of today's world and tomorrow's uncertainty.

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Review:

In the summer of 1995, Chicagoans endured weather of extremes they had never seen: daytime temperatures that, adjusted for humidity, exceeded 125 degrees Fahrenheit and nighttime temperatures that did not fall below 90. In four days, 583 people died of heat exhaustion and related causes. It was by far Chicago's greatest mass disaster, and one for which the city was utterly unprepared.

William Stevens, a science reporter for The New York Times, opens his vivid--and sometimes frightening--book The Change in the Weather with a look at the Chicago disaster, moving on to consider it and other calamities in the context of millions of years of climatic change. In the last several decades, violent storms, long considered to be aberrations of nature, have come to seem almost the norm. The jury is still out, but much evidence suggests that the so-called greenhouse effect is fueling these ever-more-powerful storms. With global warming come hotter average temperatures; hotter temperatures mean increased water vapor, the stuff from which storms are made; more storms mean more flooding; more flooding means more soil erosion and the destruction of the world's estuaries and coastlines; and so on. Stevens carefully describes some of the scientific debates on global warming and ever-nastier weather, and on what, if anything, might be done to reverse or slow these apparent trends.

Lacing his narrative with interviews with leading climatologists, Stevens offers an engrossing scientific detective story--one that threatens to become a horror story in the very near future. --Gregory McNamee

About the Author:

William K. Stevens is a science reporter for The New York Times. The author of Miracle Under the Oaks: The Revival of Nature in America, he lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

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