Review: Storm clouds coming and taking cover won't help
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 09 13, 2011
This summer in Texas a farmer looked toward the horizon and remarked that his children first saw rain when they were four years old. Maybe he was joking, but probably not. For Texas it was the eighth drought in 13 years.In Europe in the summer of 2003, the Danube fell to its lowest level in 100 years, exposing WWII tanks and unexploded bombs that had been submerged for six decades.Also in 2003 during the longest, hottest summer in Europe's history, 46,000 people died because of the heat, most of them in France.The weather extremes are the real harbinger of climate change and James Lawrence Powell documents the extremes we're experiencing as recently as August and Hurricane Irene, which was the tenth U.S. weather disaster in 2011 to cause $1 billion or more in damages. That's a record for any year in our 200-year history of charting the weather. We still have four months to go.Heat, droughts, wildfires, rainfall, floods, blizzards, tornadoes, hurricanes and cyclones: every year the worst the weather can deliver is rewriting the record books for the devastation and the suffering that's resulting.Powell builds a compelling case that because of global warming we are slipping rapidly toward a tipping point the other side of which is a place almost beyond imagining. Compelling but scary stuff.