The Weather Report: A Journey Through Unsettled Climates [Paperback]

From acclaimed public scholar Andrew Ross, groundbreaking reporting on climate change and the horizons of a just future from Palestine, UAE, Arizona, and China.

Between the summers of 2023 and 2024, temperatures rose. Coastal areas flooded while droughts and fires raged inland. Unprecedented tornadoes, hurricanes, and typhoons of astonishing force revealed the disturbances roiling the air and the oceans. And in the midst of all of this, more species than ever before disappeared from the planet in what scientists are calling Earth’s Sixth Great Extinction. Maybe reports from the front lines of the climate crisis have always been grim, but this past year was worse than any other, measurably more catastrophic in more ways for more animals and more people.

In his travels during this tumultuous year, public intellectual and noted scholar Andrew Ross criss-crossed the world, visiting Ramallah (Palestine), Dubai (UAE), Phoenix (USA), and Shanghai (China)—some of the landscapes most disturbed by human activity, whether through active warfare or massive development projects. But rather than offering another eco-polemic or recalling for us the dread prognostications of Malthus in the 19th century or Erlich in the 20th,The Weather Reportis a clear-eyed and essentially optimistic book that proposes a pragmatic, just, and urgent new common ground and reestablishes scalable projects of mutual aid and care as a new, essential center for our economic, ecological, and social well-being.

Part of the work of curbing climate doom is to hold onto a vision of the salvaged future, even under the grimmest circumstances. It is undeniable that we will be living in a quite altered biophysical world in the decades to come; the shape of that landscape is not settled but parts of it are already baked in. How we live on that unstable planet is still an open, political question. We know how the worst scenarios are likely to play out; a stl/