The Weather of the Future Quotes

“ozone and particulate matter contribute to 8,800 deaths and $71 billion in health care costs every year. The connection with global warming is nothing more than simple chemistry. Higher temperatures increase the formation of ground-level ozone and particulate matter. Ambient ozone also reduces crop yields and harms the ecosystem.”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

“The climate models showed that greenhouse gas emissions had contributed to an increase in such summers, from one in 1,000 years to at least one in 500 years and possibly one in 250 years.”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

“It’s better to build dams than to wait for the flood to come to its senses. —Mark Twain”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

“The atmosphere may be where the weather lives, but it speaks to the ocean, the land, and sea ice on a regular basis. Consider them influential friends that are capable of forcing the atmosphere to behave in ways that are sometimes, as in the case of ENSO, predictable. The hope is that if scientists can untangle all the messy relationships at work within our climate system, we should be better able to keep people out of harm’s way. The farther we can extend human memory, the longer out in time a society can see, and the better prepared we’ll be for what’s in the pipeline.”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

“Using satellites capable of measuring cloud cover from space, Chiang showed that there was an increase in high clouds during El Niño years. Specifically, high clouds just to the northeast of the Andean highlands increased during late June,”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

“In other words, the brightness of the Pleiades in late June indeed correlates with rainfall during the growing season for potatoes the following October through March.8 This climate forecast is one of many that have come to the attention of scientists, and it reinforces the importance and significance of traditional knowledge.”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

“Sahel’s rainfall, thanks to El Niño. During an El Niño event, the Sahel is typically expected to experience a drought, whereas during a La Niña event, when the tropical Pacific is cooler, the African monsoon is expected to strengthen and rainfall is expected to be more abundant.”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

“Giannini discovered that ocean temperatures helped regulate the strength of the African monsoon. What was even more fascinating was how each ocean played a specific role.”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

“In the past 100 years alone, the region experienced three devastating droughts. The first stretched from 1910 to 1916; the second stretched from 1941 to 1945; and then came the worst of all droughts, a long period of sustained declining rainfall beginning in the late 1960s and known simply as the desiccation.6”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

“But the latest climate models paint a very bleak picture. According to their predictions, by the 2040s such summers will be happening every other year. And by the end of this century, people will look back wistfully to 2003 as a time when summers were much colder.”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

“This is a very important distinction between weather and climate models: for climate forecasts, the initial conditions in the atmosphere are not as important as the external forcings that have the ability to alter the character and types of weather (i.e., the statistics or what scientists would call the “distribution” of the weather) that make up the climate.”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

“The goal was to build a model that represented the climate system. This was no small task. Weather models are concerned only about what’s happening in the atmosphere. The atmosphere has a memory of roughly one week. That’s why your local weather forecast goes out only about a week.”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

“Bjerknes had come up with equations capable of describing the behavior of the atmosphere. The state of the atmosphere at any point could be described by seven values: (1) pressure, (2) temperature, (3) density, (4) water content, and wind—(5) east, (6) north, and (7) up. In essence, Bjerknes presented Richardson with seven complex calculus problems in need of transformation.”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

“mechanisms of weather predictions are very similar to those of climate predictions. So if we’re comfortable trusting local forecasters’ predictions about weather, we should probably think about trusting the predictions coming out of the country’s climate laboratories.”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

“Predictions often give us an illusion of control in situations that are inherently out of our control. Nothing exemplifies this better than our relationship to weather forecasts.”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

“The instrument Keeling built, the gas chromatograph, works by passing infrared (IR) light through a sample of air and measuring the amount of IR absorbed by the air. Because carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, Keeling knew that the more IR absorbed by the air, the higher the concentration of CO2 in the air.”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

“The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) synthesized the results from eighteen climate models used by groups around the world to estimate climate sensitivity and its uncertainty. They estimated that a doubling of CO2 would lead to an increase in global average temperature of about 5.4°F,”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

“The last 10,000 to 20,000 years have witnessed a period of dramatic growth in human civilization. Indeed, our growth during this time is unique among all species, but it has been highly dependent on the overall consistency of the climate.”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

“Another issue, called the single-action bias,2 is the human habit of taking just one action in response to a problem in situations where multiple solutions are required.”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

“According to the Pew study, our collective list of concerns goes like this: the economy, jobs, terrorism, Social Security, education, energy, Medicare, health care, deficit reduction, health insurance, helping the poor, crime, moral decline, the military, tax cuts, environment, immigration lobbyists, trade policy, and global warming, in that order.”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

“It is not an exaggeration when I say that no place on the planet will look the same forty years down the road if climate change continues. All weather is local, and as you’ll see, in the future all climate change will be local, too.”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

“Each location I’ve chosen has its own Achilles’ heel, a vulnerability that unabated climate change will expose and exploit until the place is forever altered. Taken together these vulnerabilities show the breadth of repercussions that climate change will bring.”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

“complex interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere. Technically, El Niño (EN) describes the ocean component, whereas the atmospheric component is known as the Southern Oscillation (SO). That’s why climatologists generally refer to it as ENSO.”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

“Climatologists pick up where meteorologists leave off. We focus on weather timescales beyond the memory of the atmosphere, which is only about one week. And I guess you could say we also focus on timescales beyond human memory, which is shorter than you might think.”
― Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet