A BILLION BUTTERFLIES

The memoir of a scientist who rose from poverty in India to triumph in his specialty.

Shukla, professor of climate dynamics at George Mason University, was born in a remote village where his schoolteacher father was the only person to own a watch. No scholar, he credits his domineering father with forcing him into better schools from which he emerged in 1965 with a degree in geophysics and a job with the India Meteorological Department, followed by studies and academic appointments in the U.S., where he became a leading figure in climate science. The overwhelming meteorological problem in India throughout history was predicting monsoon rains. When they arrived, crops grew. Famine occurred when they failed. The equivalent problem in the world was weather prediction. That required determining today’s initial conditions (wind speed, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, cloudiness, etc.), then calculating how they change as time passes. This demands innumerable calculations, and supercomputers eventually enabled reliable forecasting for about a week, but it’s impossible to go further because tiny differences in initial conditions produce increasingly chaotic results as days pass. Meteorologists thus assumed that predicting climate, a year-to-year process, was also impossible, but Shukla was not so sure. Along with others, his groundbreaking research showed that combining changes in air pressure with land and ocean temperature make seasonal—and monsoon—predictions possible. As the 21st century approached, Shukla grew concerned about global warming brought on by fossil fuel burning. The book’s final quarter recounts his work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which (together with Al Gore) won the Nobel Peace Prize. No Pollyanna, he writes bluntly that the IPCC has failed, and he himself suffered a torrent of abuse.

An admirable and inspiring account from a pioneering figure in climate research.