Very informative and easy to follow! Definitely one I’d recommend. I study disasters in graduate school, and this one honestly delivered!

Human-caused climate change is our new reality. The coming generations will experience dramatic changes due to the damage we’ve already done to the planet’s fragile systems. In this book, Chris Funk discusses those systems and how they function, as well as what went wrong.

Detailing some well-known extreme climate events of the past few years, the author shows us how changes to worldwide temperatures have altered the natural cycles of the planet to produce these extreme events. Everything from drought to fire to floods to storms, all has been affected. Eventually, everyone on the planet will feel the effects of these alterations. It’s just a matter of time.

The author goes into detail explaining each event or series of events. The planetary weather patterns and processes behind the events are explained in detail so the reader can understand what the causes were. It is a great look at the science behind climatic events, and incredibly informative. I enjoyed diving more deeply into the science behind it and thought that the author did a great job explaining these concepts for a general audience.

The human stories behind these events are also explained. Many of these extreme events result in people losing homes, livelihoods, and even their lives. Famine and disease can also result from these extremes. Agriculture is affected by the heat or floods. People can’t grow enough food. Starvation results. The author has used the science to predict where these events will happen in order to help with humanitarian aid to those regions that will be affected by famine. That’s a great use for this data!

The book contains many tables, graphs, and charts, all of which show graphically how changes over time led to events that made headlines. Some are just changes that are beginning to show up in the climate data that have implications for the future. We all live on this one planet. It is the only home we have. Any information we can gather about the effects of our changing climate that can be used for mitigation of those effects is useful, in my opinion. A variety of scientific disciplines need to be involved in looking at the overall picture. The data this author has contributed should be built upon by other disciplines to build a complete picture of the issue. Then, we all need to act on that data and make some changes. Books like this can help all of us understand this issue and give more background that we need to make informed decisions. If you want to look deeply into the science, this book is perfect for you. I recommend it.

This book by climatologist Chris Funk attempts to explain the effects of climate change on severe weather events, and what the possibilities are for the future

The book is primarily focused on the the years 2015 – 2019; Funk details several different severe weather events during this time period and explains how climate change may have contributed to their intensity. Funk explains that his original interest in this field came from a humanitarian perspective; he was concerned with possibly preventing, or at least predicting and preparing for extreme climate events to reduce the loss of life.

The first few chapters give a background on how our planet developed into the current ecosystem, and an explanation of general climate science. Funk starts all the way back with the Big Bang, and then goes through the formation of the Sun and Earth and our atmosphere, before highlighting how fragile the balance of gases in the atmosphere is. Funk goes on to explain Hadley circulation, CAPE relative energy, Santa Anna winds, and the greenhouse effect.

Starting with Chapter 5, Funk discusses specific weather events from 2015 to 2019. There are chapters about heat waves, precipitation extremes, hurricanes, El Ninos and La Ninas, and droughts and wildfires. With each chapter Funk describes the severity of the events, and then discusses whether the event was possibly made more intense by climate change.

This was an informative book, but there were a couple of issues that I had with it. First, the book didn't seem to be very well organized, and the author tended to jump around to different topics, so it didn't seem to flow very well. This was not a major problem, it just made the book seem a bit chaotic. My other issue is that this approach to analyzing climate change seems to be somewhat less scientific than other fields of science. Predicting the effects of climate change is extremely difficult, and this book is attempting to retroactively decide if a warming climate made events worse, and it often comes off as opinion based, or at least open to interpretation. I do appreciate the charts and other data compiled here though, and this is still worth reading, just be prepared for a bit of jumping around.