(note: we’ll have a feature soon on Jane Marsching’s Guest Lecture Saturday at the Queens Museum, but in the meantime…)
A quick visual survey of the circulating weather section at the NYPL Science, Industry and Business Library:
Interestingly, alarmist weather books are not at all limited to those centered on climate change. It seems it could be an entire literary subgenre.
Daniel says
Those titles reflect my first ‘physics’ exposure to the topic of climate change. I remember going to a colloqium as a graduate student where the speaker was talking about the amount of energy that industrialization introduces into the enviornment. This energy increase is a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics: it is impossible for any cyclic process to occur whose sole effect is the extraction of heat from a reservoir and performance of an equivalent amount of work. Read: there are no perfect engines. The point this speaker made was that introducing more energy into a system does NOT necessarily increase the temperature. However, it does increase the fluctuations. Violent weather then can be seen as a fluctuation.