The Reference Shelf: Extreme Weather

This volume of The Reference Shelf looks at the human contribution to climate change and extreme weather. Climate change has become a hot-button political topic. Powerful political lobbies are trying to resist making changes to lessen the impact of humanity upon the climate, because in doing so reduces their capacity to profit from the harvest and sale of fossil fuels. But, extreme weather is more common now than it was in the past. In the 1980s, there were more than eighty days, on average, between major extreme weather events. A recent study suggested that, in the 2020s, the United States has an extreme weather event that causes more than a billion in damages approximately every ten days.