From a leading scientist, this gripping nonfiction book explains how recent weather disasters—including heat waves, massive forest fires, and hurricanes—can be definitively linked to climate change, through the revolutionary method of World Weather Attribution.
A TIME 100 Most Influential Person of 2021: Friederike Otto
“Meet the forensic scientists of climate change; if you like 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 and The End of Nature
Angry Weather tells the compelling, day-by-day story of Hurricane Harvey, which caused over a hundred deaths and $125 billion in damage in 2017. As the hurricane unfolds, 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.
This new ability to determine climate change’s role in extreme weather events has the potential to dramatically transform society—for individuals, who can see how climate change affects their loved ones, and corporations and governments, who may see themselves held accountable in the courts. Otto’s research laid out in this groundbreaking book will have profound impacts, both today and for the future of humankind.
Published in Partnership with the David Suzuki Institute.
Friederike (Fredi) Otto is a physicist, philosopher, climate researcher, senior lecturer at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. Otto is also the co-founder and lead 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 other outlets. Otto was named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People of 2021 and and as one of the top 10 people who helped shape science in 2021 by the journal Nature.
