Going to Extremes, by James Lawrence Powell. iTunes (requires iBooks 2), $0.99
Guest review by Dan Fagin
Bad weather always looks worse through a window, said Tom Lehrer, the songwriter cum mathematician. From my desk at home on Long Island, I can see the backyard grass – okay, crabgrass – slowly yellowing. The thermometer under the yew tree reads 96 degrees Fahrenheit; we haven’t had a respectable rain for weeks. At least my brother in Colorado Springs is back home: He had to evacuate when the Waldo Canyon wildfire advanced to within two blocks of his house. Through my other window on the world – my computer screen – I read that Floridians are still dealing with flood damage from a freakishly early tropical storm, Debby, which struck in June. That’s a mere inconvenience, though, compared to the deadly weather-related chaos in Russia and Brazil.
This is the new normal: weird, hot, and often dangerous weather. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration says that the first six months of 2012 were by far the hottest on record, and that most of the South and West is in severe drought. Scientists, campaigners, and scientist-campaigners have been saying for years that Americans will soon find it impossible to overlook the effects of the 150-year buildup of heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere; now, perhaps, that fateful moment has come. Certainly there is some evidence that the extreme weather events of 2011 and 2012 have moved the needle of U.S. public opinion at least slightly toward accepting the reality of human-induced climate change, even if the electorate remains starkly polarized on basic questions climatologists resolved years ago.
There is some irony that extreme weather is having a political impact, because it’s not at all easy to credibly explain the relationship between singular weather events and humanity’s ongoing reckless experiment in atmospheric chemistry. The problem is that what we call “the weather” – atmospheric conditions at a specific place and time – is the product of the extremely chaotic process driven by differences in air and water density which are, in turn, driven by uneven solar heating. (The simplest example: sunlight striking the tropics more directly than the higher latitudes.) Weather on Earth is never perfectly stable because solar energy is never distributed perfectly evenly across the planet’s surface. Climate – the long-term averaging of weather measurements – is unstable, too, but climatic changes are much harder for humans to perceive because of the longer time scale. But even so, if the billions of tons of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases we expel into the atmosphere every year are having an effect – and we now know that they are – then climate, not weather, is where the signal will always be clearest. We may feel this signal in day-to-day weather, but we can most reliably measure it in longer-term changes in climate.
But what is Powell really telling us, beyond the incontestable fact that we’ve had a lot of hellacious weather lately? Not enough, in my opinion. The narrative is sparse; the most interesting parts of this short volume (95 iPad pages, which isn’t a lot) are the many charts, maps and graphs, which are mostly from NOAA and other government agencies. The most important chart shows the trend in NOAA’s Climate Extremes Index, which has been moving upward since the 1970s. (There have been some gyrations along the way, as one would expect with an index that tracks weather events, not climate). Powell presents some other interesting data sets, too, including a 30-year trend chart based on Munich Re’s natural catastrophe data. (The sharpest increases are for storms, floods and extreme temperature, but geophysical events – earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis – are up only slightly, all of which is consistent with the hypothesis that anthropogenic emissions are a significant driver of climate.)
As a weather geek, I could look at those graphs for hours and be captivatingly horrified at the future they portend, but I wouldn’t need to buy Powell’s ebook to see them. I could easily find them myself, with even more recent data, via a simple web search. What I’m looking for from a book, including an ebook, is analysis, explication and argument. I want to hear about possible solutions (see Al Gore) and engage the claims of self-described skeptics who capitalize on the public’s weather/climate confusion to wrongly argue that extreme weather events have nothing to do with human agency. To be fair, Powell has done this at length in other books, but he barely does it at all here, and the book feels wafer-thin as a result. (I’m more optimistic about a promising new book on the same topic – written by two friends, full disclosure – but I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.)
Powell does take a brief stab at explication by using everyone’s favorite weather/climate metaphor: the loaded dice. (I prefer the juiced-up-ballplayer analogy, which is cleverer, but the crooked dice analogy works, too.) There is a great deal of randomness in day-to-day weather, just as there is in rolling a pair of fair dice. But, as Powell points out, if you rolled 100 times and got a “12” 15 times – five times the expected number – you’d strongly suspect you were rolling loaded dice. “But by then,” he notes, “it would be too late to do anything about it. Waiting until global warming has caused so many climate disasters that no one can have any doubt about its reality is like waiting until the game is over to decide whether the dice are loaded. A better approach would be to keep track of each throw in the dice game as it occurred, like a blackjack player counting cards…. Instead of waiting for decades to find out whether global warming has occurred, we need to keep track of it as it goes, and the best way to do that is by paying close attention to extreme weather events. 2011 gave us more than enough.”
But most of us already know this; we can see the plain evidence through our office windows and computer screens. What we need to understand much more deeply is how that visible evidence fits into the scientific big picture of human-induced climate change. James Powell is very well qualified to tell us much more about that, but Going to Extremes is mostly a missed opportunity to do so.
Dan Fagin is a writer and professor at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, where he is the director of the masters-level Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program. His next book, on environmental epidemiology and the Toms River, New Jersey, cancer cluster, will be published in the spring of 2013 by Random House.