On Heidi Cullen's "The Weather of the Future": Forecast for 2050: Your car just melted and your hair is on fire.

Heidi Cullen, a climatologist perhaps most famous for being The Brainy One on The Weather Channel (as opposed to, say, Stephanie Abrams, The Smiling Babe), has a new book out titled The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet. I’m a diehard veteran of the Climate Change debate, and have read over a dozen books on the subject: Cullen’s is a good addition, focused mainly on the science of climate models. She argues forcibly that like weather forecasting, which has improved greatly in the last century, climate models have improved enormously in the last two decades, and they agree on the overall shape (or temp) of the future: It will be hot. Miserable hot. Drought hot. Hot with crazy storms. Here’s a quote:
“Ice cores collected form Antarctica and Greenland can be used to reconstruct climate hundreds of thousands of years ago, showing that the preindustrial amount f CO2—the level from A.D. 1000 to 1750—in the atmosphere was about 280 ppm, about 105 ppm below today’s value. The record indicates that the concentration of CO2 has increased about 36 percent in the last 150 years, with about half of that increase happening in the last three decades. In fact, the CO2 concentration is now higher than any seen in at least the past 800,000 years—and probably many millions of years before the earliest ice core measurement” (29-30).
Cullen makes an interesting, and ballsy, rhetorical move in the second half of the book: She includes forecasts for years such as Jan 2027 or August 2050. It’s threatening, scary material. And it goes against the grain of the “Oh, don’t worry,” mentality that seems, at the moment, pervasive.

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