A billion butterflies A life in climate and chaos theory

Shukla became fascinated by monsoons as a boy in a village in India bereft of modern amenities, where boys had their lessons beneath a tree. One of the many charms of this enthralling scientist's memoir is how Shukla, now in his eighties, marvels at the trajectory of his exceptional experiences from such humble beginnings. He tells personal tales that downplay his intellectual gifts even as he describes his demanding studies, which brought him to the U.S., cultural clashes, and his painstaking, innovative, often daring work creating complex meteorological models, advancing weather forecasting, founding an independent nonprofit research group, bolstering climate science, and working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the year it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore. Shukla weaves in incisive accounts of meteorological history, academic power struggles, the butterfly effect's role in seasonal and climate forecasts, the evolution from punch-card computers to supercomputers, his founding of a college in his village, and the vicious harassment and threats he faced when he publicly challenged climate-change denial and cover-ups. Steadfast in his dedication to improving the lives of those most vulnerable to the climate crisis, Shukla is a captivating storyteller, modest, funny, and warm. Readers will be thrilled to discover a new hero, a globally impactful scientist, educator, and humanitarian.

Shukla, a climate science professor at George Mason University, debuts with an affecting account of how he transcended his impoverished childhood to become a world-renowned meteorologist. Despite growing up in a rural Indian village without a schoolhouse (class was taught under a banyan tree whenever the weather allowed), Shukla excelled academically and studied math and physics at Banaras Hindu University. In his early 20s, he joined the newly formed Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology and aspired to improve monsoon predictions for residents of his hometown, who depended on knowing when rain would fall to sustain their crops. Shukla describes how, after taking a position at George Mason University's Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Interactions in the mid-1980s, he revolutionized meteorology with his "billion butterfly experiment," which found that such conditions as humidity, precipitation, and temperature so strongly influence weather patterns that even the proverbial fluttering of a billion butterflies (a metaphor meteorologists used to denote the once prevalent belief that weather was shaped by the cumulative tiny movements of countless agents) could not overwhelm them. Though the focus is on Shukla's impressive professional achievements, he doesn't shy away from divulging details about his personal life, recounting how his obsession with his work made him an absentee father and how his arranged first marriage fell apart. It's a scintillating look at the rewards and pitfalls of dedicating one's life to science. Agent: Lauren Sharp, Aevitas Creative Management. (Apr.)

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.