Heidi Cullen

Climatologist Heidi Cullen has written a chilling book about global warming by describing the effects climate change will have on people in seven regions around the globe. Although some may have heard of Dr. Cullen because she had a show on climate on the Weather Channel, I picked up the book not because I knew who she was but because the nearby Catskill Mountains had so recently been devastated by Irene, downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm just as it reached New York, but still show more a tremendous and dangerous rain-maker.

After initially discussing the differences between climate and weather (in a nutshell, timescale), how we can study past climate change, how prediction works, and how by testing models on the past scientists can fine-tune them to look at the future, she turns to the heart of the book: examining how climate change affects seven key regions, each with its own set of problems. In doing so, she is able to introduce the variety of problems global warming will create, and in each profile she interviews people familiar with the area and its issues,not just climate specialists, but engineers, ecologists, water experts, people working with local groups, and more. Each profile first focuses on the issues and then includes a fictional 40-year forecast, based on what is known about the area and its problems. Through this approach, she covers a broad range of impacts of global warming, while giving it a human face.

The areas and issues she profiles are: the Sahel region of Africa (famine, crop losses, water resources), the Great Barrier Reef of Australia (coral bleaching, ocean acidification, and economic challenges), the Central Valley of California (drought, regional water resources, agriculture problems), the Arctic, including both the Inuit area in Canada and Greenland, each with its own challenges (ice melt, mineral resources, a navigable Arctic circle), Dhaka and Bangladesh in general (sea level rise, floods, and what she calls "climate refugees), and New York City (hurricanes, infrastructure, sea level rise).

In her introduction, Cullen says that after one of her seminars a man came up to her, complimented her on her lecture, and asked her whether he should sell his beach house. She realized that "the scientific community had failed to communicate the threat of climate change in a way that made it real for people right now." In trying to to do just that, she has written a readable and important book. show less

Cullen's book seems like it should be required reading for anyone living in this era of global warming (and that would be all of us). I found that it pushed me past my own apocalyptic denial; Cullen writes with such care and authority about the ways global warming would and is already affecting specific places around the globe. She weaves in elements of her own research career, profiles the personalities of the key scientists in the field that might be called “coping with reality.” The show more book is chock-full of scientific explanations yet eminently readable.

And, for the craft nerd commercial, something cool to think about in the land of literary nonfiction: at the end of every chapter, Cullen presents imagined scenarios of what might happen in specific regions in the future. The cue to the reader is simple: a date that hasn’t happened yet. And this is 1) clear to any reader who’s paying attention and 2) eminently helpful. What she does is take the dire and abstract predictions of science and make them REAL and also more specific and human by imagining one scenario of how global warming might affect people, geography, the environment, and the weather. This is a lovely example of genre-bending as well as a clear use of fiction, clearly demarcated, within nonfiction, for the purposes of reader edification.

The takeaway: imagination is NOT anathema in the field of literary nonfiction. In fact, I think it’s a no-brainer for good nonfiction. All you have to do is communicate to the reader that you’re stepping into the land of “let’s imagine.” show less

'The Weather of the Future' comes off from the title and back-cover description to be a book that uses current research and knowledge about climate change to anticipate how day-to-day weather might look in the future in certain parts of the world. Written in the late-2000s, this is of course a bit dated (author Heidi Cullen frequently cites the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, whereas here in January 2025 we are almost two years removed from the Sixth Assessment Report), but climate change show more research in recent years has been more about refining predictions and models as opposed to wholesale changes in methodology and ideology. Climate change is real, is happening, and will get worse in the future - that was true then, is true now, and will be true in the future.

As a meteorologist and fan of borderline-fiction-narrative looks into the future (I very much enjoyed Stephen Markley's dystopian "cli-fi" book 'The Deluge'), I was looking forward to reading this. The author draws on her own meteorological background to inform these multi-year and multi-decade looks into the future for seven different parts of the world that are seen as particularly vulnerable to climate change: this includes the Arctic, Bangladesh, and New York City, among others.

Cullen spends the first handful-dozen pages of the book laying "the groundwork" about climate change: the typical descriptions about what climate change actually is, how it has been and is being proven, etc. The usual introduction to any climate change book oriented towards the populace, if you will. That is all fine and good; the author does a great job keeping this part simple but easy to understand.

The second part of the book, the larger of the two, deals with those seven "hotspot" areas around the world. Each chapter - with one chapter covering one location - is consumed mainly by background information and local context about that given location. For example, the Inuit people and their lifestyle are a focal point of the Arctic chapter, and I really enjoyed reading about the meshing of Inuit knowledge and culture with modern technology when it comes to weather forecasting, intuitive knowledge about whether certain swaths of sea ice are safe to cross or not, etc. Often, the author involves experts whose fields of research are specifically tied to that given location that is being analyzed.

As stated, this covers the vast majority of the chapter. Only at the end do we get a look at these predictions for how the weather might looks years and decades down the road. First and foremost, it's modestly entertaining to read the predictions for years in the 2010s and early-2020s, because it's already 2025 as I read this! Thankfully, some of the more dire predictions made in the book have not come true yet, but of course that doesn't mean they won't come true at all.

Climate change predictions are difficult, and I respect Cullen for making an effort to bridge daily weather that is much more tangible to our day-to-day lives with climate change, which is much harder for people to wrap their heads around. Any predictions of this nature will be met with skepticism, no matter how sound the research they are based on is. This comes from the ill-conceived notion of 'If a weather forecast ten days out is inaccurate, how are we supposed to believe something 20+ years out?'. The author makes the valid and correct point that climate predictions are more or less simpler than daily weather, since climate is about trends in weather that smooth over day-to-day volatility in the weather. It is silly to ignore climate models forecasting 10-30 years into the future but trust the TV meteorologist's 7-day forecast... but I digress.

This was a solid read overall. I wish the author had spent more time digging into potential impacts. Cullen fills her predictions with hypothetical hurricanes hitting New York City, mass flooding in Bangladesh, etc., and while these are certainly plausible, it feels rushed and like the author is intentionally diverting the attention of the reader away from the prediction parts of each chapter and instead towards the first part (the context, background, etc). Given that the book professes to differentiate itself from other climate change books because it shows these realistic projections, I was disappointed in what felt like a comparative lack of attention in this prediction section.

This was more of an overarching look at climate change, followed by recent changes and current research efforts concerning climate change in several key areas of the globe, with an addendum of predictions about the weather down the road. I was hoping for more. 3.0/5.0 stars. show less

I wanted something more substantial than these chatty interviews, but I found the sources helpful, and someone with a more general interest would find many interesting things. In addition to New York City, which is my main interest, the book deals with the Sahel, Australia's Great Barrier Reef, California's Central Valley, the Arctic, and Dhaka, Bangladesh