Cullen's book seems like it should be required reading for anyone living in this era of global warming (and that would be all of us). I found that it pushed me past my own apocalyptic denial; Cullen writes with such care and authority about the ways global warming would and is already affecting specific places around the globe. She weaves in elements of her own research career, profiles the personalities of the key scientists in the field that might be called “coping with reality.” The book is chock-full of scientific explanations yet eminently readable.

And, for the craft nerd commercial, something cool to think about in the land of literary nonfiction: at the end of every chapter, Cullen presents imagined scenarios of what might happen in specific regions in the future. The cue to the reader is simple: a date that hasn’t happened yet. And this is 1) clear to any reader who’s paying attention and 2) eminently helpful. What she does is take the dire and abstract predictions of science and make them REAL and also more specific and human by imagining one scenario of how global warming might affect people, geography, the environment, and the weather. This is a lovely example of genre-bending as well as a clear use of fiction, clearly demarcated, within nonfiction, for the purposes of reader edification.

The takeaway: imagination is NOT anathema in the field of literary nonfiction. In fact, I think it’s a no-brainer for good nonfiction. All you have to do is communicate to the reader that you’re stepping into the land of “let’s imagine.” ( )

Heat Waves, extreme storms, and other scenes from a climate-changed planet

Basic, but clear and concise. Spends the first half walking the reader through an overview of the science of climate prediction in general and human-caused climate change in particular. If you're reasonably well-read on this topic, not a whole lot new, but very well expressed. The second half looks at scenarios for particular locations: Sahel, Great Barrier Reef, California Central Valley*, Canadian/Greenland Arctic, Bangladesh, and New York City. Covers possibilities for both disaster and adaptation, although honestly it doesn't look good anywhere.

* Having read [b:A Dangerous Place: California's Unsettling Fate|103911|A Dangerous Place California's Unsettling Fate|Marc Reisner|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171503624s/103911.jpg|3025259], some of this was actually familiar, if still totally unnerving. ( )

I wanted something more substantial than these chatty interviews, but I found the sources helpful, and someone with a more general interest would find many interesting things. In addition to New York City, which is my main interest, the book deals with the Sahel, Australia's Great Barrier Reef, California's Central Valley, the Arctic, and Dhaka, Bangladesh ( )

Climatologist Heidi Cullen has written a chilling book about global warming by describing the effects climate change will have on people in seven regions around the globe. Although some may have heard of Dr. Cullen because she had a show on climate on the Weather Channel, I picked up the book not because I knew who she was but because the nearby Catskill Mountains had so recently been devastated by Irene, downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm just as it reached New York, but still a tremendous and dangerous rain-maker.

After initially discussing the differences between climate and weather (in a nutshell, timescale), how we can study past climate change, how prediction works, and how by testing models on the past scientists can fine-tune them to look at the future, she turns to the heart of the book: examining how climate change affects seven key regions, each with its own set of problems. In doing so, she is able to introduce the variety of problems global warming will create, and in each profile she interviews people familiar with the area and its issues,not just climate specialists, but engineers, ecologists, water experts, people working with local groups, and more. Each profile first focuses on the issues and then includes a fictional 40-year forecast, based on what is known about the area and its problems. Through this approach, she covers a broad range of impacts of global warming, while giving it a human face.

The areas and issues she profiles are: the Sahel region of Africa (famine, crop losses, water resources), the Great Barrier Reef of Australia (coral bleaching, ocean acidification, and economic challenges), the Central Valley of California (drought, regional water resources, agriculture problems), the Arctic, including both the Inuit area in Canada and Greenland, each with its own challenges (ice melt, mineral resources, a navigable Arctic circle), Dhaka and Bangladesh in general (sea level rise, floods, and what she calls "climate refugees), and New York City (hurricanes, infrastructure, sea level rise).

In her introduction, Cullen says that after one of her seminars a man came up to her, complimented her on her lecture, and asked her whether he should sell his beach house. She realized that "the scientific community had failed to communicate the threat of climate change in a way that made it real for people right now." In trying to to do just that, she has written a readable and important book.