The Weather of the Future

Essential reading for anyone who’s planning to inhabit the planet for the next few decades.” — Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe From Heidi Cullen, one of America’s foremost experts on weather and climate change and a senior research scientist with Climate Central, a fascinating and provocative book that predicts what different parts of the world will look like in the year 2050 if current levels of carbon emissions are maintained. 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.