Angry Weather: Heat Waves, Floods, Storms, and the New Science of Climate Change (World Weather Attribution) Hardcover – September 10, 2020

a good reference that many governments need to consider building up their climate plocies for the currnet and future generations

Climate? Weather? Y this book clarifies a lot and how scientists move from one to the other!

This book provides excellent context for climate change, what it’s potential consequences are, and how we arrive at the data.It is also apolitical!I have to buy copies to give as presents.

This book describes the little-known but very important progress in the last few years on the methods of quantifying the relative contribution of global climate change to short-term extreme weather events at a local scale — the new “attribution science”. The authors describe numerous case examples, such as the 2018 extreme heat events in northern Europe and very intense rainfall events elsewhere. Based on their analyses, in some cases, global climate change made such extreme events much more likely to happen than without climate change, and in other cases climate change had little or no effect on that probability. Statements about such probabilities are one end result of these attribution studies. Based on experience with over 170 case examples, the methods of attribution science are now becoming widely accepted and are being used by governments, non-governmental organizations, and the courts around the world to influence their recommendations, actions, and legal decisions. This book summarizes the methods and results in lay-reader terms. It is therefore highly recommended for the general public, government officials, industry executives, university students and faculty, and members of non-governmental organizations. The only reason that I did not give this book five stars is that its numerous key points, which are very important, are often not clearly articulated. Those key messages often get lost amid excessive verbiage, whereas they could have been more succinctly summarized in lists at the end of each chapter.

Love this book. Good read.

I was looking for science and found opinions flowing freely. To quote from the editorial note on page 206. "Sources are provided for all the facts in the book, but the interpretation of these sources is mine and not the only possible interpretation". Indeed.

Certain types of natural disasters are becoming worse or more common with climate change and we often have a good idea of about how much. Is it also possible to tell by how much climate change made a specific event more likely? Is it possible to tell by how much climate change made the event worse or different? Those are different and much more difficult questions once considered futile. However, the relatively new science of attribution science uses statistical considerations and local data to do exactly that. It is not always possible to do it, but it has been done successfully in more than 170 cases.The book also gives a background to climate, weather, climate change, the role of climate in natural disasters, the IPCC, climate science, climate modeling, climate denial and the climate denial organizations (Heartland Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute), and the book also discusses solutions such as carbon pricing, which the author recommends.It should be noted that just because you cannot do attribution science for a specific event does not mean that climate change was not involved. It just means that you cannot demonstrate to what degree global warmings influenced the event using statistics. An example was the north European heatwave/drought the summer of 2018. When I visited northern Sweden (my home country) in 2018 for my dad’s funeral, temperatures reached 90’s for the first time since they started recording them in the 19th century. The same was true for the average temperature, the record drought and the never-before-seen wildfires.At first, I thought that would be a perfect example for attribution science, but it turned out it wasn’t. Part of reason being that it was an extreme outlier. Basically, how do you know it was not a once in a millennium event that just happen to happen in 2018? You can’t show a trend with one extreme. Also, the fact that the average summer temperatures fluctuate more at these latitudes make it harder to do attribution science. Attribution science worked better in places with lesser extremes and clearer trends (other places in northern Europe for the same heatwave). That does not mean that global warming isn’t obvious at high latitudes. On the contrary, the visibly shorter snow seasons, the visibly changing eco-systems, melting glaciers, etc., are clear indicators, but that doesn’t mean the attribution science is easier.Being able to determine the role of climate change for a specific event opens up a lot of possibilities. If climate change made an event that killed 1,000 people and cost 10 billion dollars double as likely you could theoretically blame 500 deaths and 5 billion dollars on climate change and attribute 50 deaths and 500 million dollars to a country or corporation that contributed 10% of the emissions. So, lawsuits and reparations as well as insurance are likely to follow. Attribution science is a useful as well as potentially controversial tool.The book also discusses the Climateprediction.net project. Volunteers allow the climate attribution team to run climate modeling on their computers/laptops thereby donating computing power to the researchers. I am seriously considering doing this myself.The book was full of interesting statistics and information, and it was a delightful read. The author did not always explain things well and I think the organization of the book could improve. However, those are minor complaints. I am excited that I just learned something about this new potentially politically very controversial science (but not scientifically controversial). Now let some politician heads explode.

How refreshing to read something balanced and thought provoking. This book will need an update pretty soon and I will read it with equal interest.

One of the a Christmas gifts recommended by Katharine Hayhoe was this book. Glad I read it and have a better idea of what climate is doing and a bit about what it is not doing.I highly recommend this book which is both easy to read (because it is well written) and hard to read (because of what we learn). I hope to hear from more scientist on the subject in the future.

Really interesung read. Well written for someone with no specialst knowledge of this

It's difficult to see the relationship between events like storms, fires and floods and our individual and societal behaviour. This book is about new science that attempts, in my view convincingly, to make that link and to explain it in layperson's terms.

An excellent, detailed look at attribution studies. Really accessible and useful.