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A pioneering scientist solves a pressing climate question: Can we pin the blame for individual extreme weather events on humans?
Massive fires, widespread floods, category 4 hurricanes – weather disasters are becoming more frequent each year, but not everyone agrees on what causes them. Renowned University of Oxford researcher Friederike Otto provides an answer with attribution science, a revolutionary method for pinpointing the role of climate change in extreme weather events. Anchoring her book with the gripping, day-by-day story of Hurricane Harvey, which caused over a hundred deaths and $125 billion in damage in 2017, Otto reveals how attribution science works in real time, and determines that Harvey's terrifying floods were three times more likely to occur due to human-induced climate change.
At a time when our inability to determine climate change's role in weather events has impacted everything from how much aid a devastated region receives to the culpability of corporations and governments, Otto's research laid out in this groundbreaking book will have profound impacts, both today and for the future of humankind.
Friederike (Fredi) Otto is a physicist, climate researcher, associate professor, and the acting director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. Otto is also a co-investigator on the international project World Weather Attribution, which assesses the human influence on extreme weather and has been profiled in the New York Times, Nature, and others.
"Attribution science – climate forensics, or reverse engineering – is a new discipline explained in this book with passion and verve by one of its creators. Fredi Otto is destined to be one of those rare scientists whose name becomes well known in the wider world."
– Mark Denny, author of Making Sense of Weather and Climate: The Science Behind the Forecasts
"Angry Weather introduces us to the forensic scientists of climate change; if you like to watch CSI, you'll be equally enthralled with the skill and speed these folks exhibit. But the stakes are infinitely higher!"
– Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
"This fascinating book takes us on a voyage across the cutting edge of climate science that irrevocably alters our perspective of the world in which we live and the future it holds. I wish I could make this book required reading for the world."
– Katharine Hayhoe, UN Champion of the Earth
