Most Helpful Customer Reviews
29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Understanding Climate Science, August 14, 2010
This review is from: The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet (Hardcover)
Cullen's book is a good review of climatological information. For me, it fills in the blanks of my knowledge on the subject. Right from the beginning, she establishes a perspective that's missing from the generally available information. She begins with the history of climate science, nicely describing in chronological order, the individuals who made the early breakthroughs that bring us to our moment, with our much more sophisticated multi-model, super-computer averaged, long term climate forecasts.
She explains clearly the relationship of the earth's natural greenhouse gasses, including water vapor, methane, and the pivotal role of carbon dioxide, as the geo-historic regulator gas, which has directly effected the planet's temperature. In fact, like many other scientists, she points out, without irony, how modern society continues to relentlessly release these very gasses...through the burning of oil, coal, and natural gas. Gases, which took nature thousands of years to sequester...modern society releases in little more than a century. Thus our "forcings" are unwittingly reestablishing the same conditions of an earlier greenhouse earth...a much warmer place than today.
Of particular interest to me, is her explication of the contribution of Charles Keeling of Caltech, who single handedly had the insight to build the first instruments to measure accurately the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Keeling began his work in 1958, when he measured carbon dioxide at 315 ppm. Since, his work has closely described, with exquisitely sensitive data, a rise to 385 ppm by 2008. This is the highest carbon dioxide level in 800,000 years.
This book is also clear about the human reasons, why global warming is so low in the public's perception of what constitutes a crisis. Cullen, as a highly qualified, media savvy educator, with a PHD in climate science...having had her own show on the Weather Channel...describes very wisely and calmly, I think, how humans seem to be hard-wired, only for much more immanent crises...in some wonderfully insightful pages on human psychology.
Like most voices in the climate science community, Cullen is what her opponents call an "alarmist". In fact, climatologists like Cullen, ARE alarmed by the science they see becoming more and more powerful, just as our weather becomes more and more extreme. This, she demonstrates in the heart of her thesis, focusing in detail upon weather prognostications, in six world regions. This is not joyful reading. If you are a reader who dislikes such talk, then this book is not for you. But if you are one, who is willing to listen to the best of what climate science offers, Cullen should be on the top of your list.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
26 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It's already too hot and getting even hotter- What Global Warming will mean to Humanity in the decades ahead, August 4, 2010
This review is from: The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet (Hardcover)
Heidi Cullen is perhaps the most well- known climatologist in America. She has in the past taken to task those weather broadcasters who have no real scientific knowledge of more long- range climate patterns. In this book she makes a valiant educational effort to teach the wider public the more long- range consquences of continued global warming. She chooses seven different areas of the world and projects dramatic scenarios for midcentury which will come as result of failure to curb our appetite for fossil fuels.
Drought in central California, flooding in Bangladesh which makes millions homeless, New York infrastructure under water are among these. Cullen makes vivid the disastrous storms, floods, droughts, which are headed humanity's way. She also suggests that climate- changes will be a source of more intense political and military conflict.
She argues that most of us associate global- warming with the melting of the ice- cap only and do not connect this with the everyday weather we are experiencing. I can only say that one of my major reasons for interest in this book is the weather I have been experiencing over the past two weeks ( Late July Early August 2010) in Jerusalem Israel. In my thirty- five years
here I have never seen or felt anything like it. The sheer discomfort alone is I believe reason enough to be alarmed at what is happening.
My own small personal experience aside. This book will give its readers a good overall understanding of one of the most urgent problems facing humanity today.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
complex climate rendered readable, March 19, 2011
This review is from: The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet (Hardcover)
"Dr. Heidi Cullen has a way of presenting complex climate simply and clearly, and this book is a shining example of that skill.
In part I, she shows how present-day understanding of climate is built upon science from 16th centrury forward, easily covering knowledge discovery in orbital mechanics, geography, and chemistry. Her presentation of temperature rises of 2, 4, 6 degrees is clever. In part II, she presents scenarios in the Sudan, Australia, the Arctic and elsewhere, devoting a chapter to each place. Starting each with an applicable climate lesson told by scientists in drought, coral reefs, ice melt, and so forth, she then takes the reader in each situation forward, describing the conditions in these places in a futuristic time.
Always solidly based on science and anchored in climate model projections, the scenarios are chillingly realistic. Yet, each chapter tells of adaptation techniques that can help. No doom and gloom here - but only if we don't let things get too bad too fast.
In all her time doing climate on the Weather Channel, we never could catch her in a mistake, and this book is no different. This book gives us a realistic view to the future that awaits us if we fail to act. Heidi Cullen'sthe Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, Other Scenes From a Climate-changed Planet [Hardcover](2010)
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
