Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha
Title: A Billion Butterflies: A Life in Climate and Chaos Theory
Author: Jagadish Shukla
Publisher: Pan Macmillan India
This is a fascinating autobiography – autobiography of an Indian who revolutionised monsoon forecasting. Raised in a rural area of India devoid of electricity, plumbing, or formal educational institutions, he participated in classes conducted within a cow shed. Shukla’s upbringing was marked by erratic weather patterns, including intense monsoons and severe droughts, which resulted in unpredictable agricultural yields. His resolve led him to the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, despite having limited experience. Subsequently, he embarked on an unexpected journey to MIT and Princeton, reaching the pinnacle of climate science.
His contributions have made it possible to forecast weather further into the future than was previously deemed achievable, enabling us to nourish more individuals, preserve lives, and maintain hope in an increasingly warming world.
A Billion Butterflies by Shukla offers a remarkable insider’s perspective on climate science, alongside an extraordinary memoir of his life. Grasping the concept of dynamical seasonal prediction will transform our experience of thunderstorms and our interpretation of forecasts; the incredible narrative of the individual who uncovered this will alter our perception of the world.
The fundamental concept of this heartfelt narrative revolves around envisioning a world devoid of weather forecasting. How would we determine when to evacuate populations in anticipation of fires or floods, or decide what attire to don the following day? Until four decades ago, we were unable to predict weather conditions beyond a ten-day horizon.
Writes Shukla in the Prologue: “In the past one hundred fifty years, humans chopped down many of Earth’s carbon-sucking forests and began burning fossil fuels to heat their homes, power their factories, and propel their vehicles, releasing unprecedented amounts of CO2, into the atmosphere. Like the glass walls of a greenhouse, CO2, admits energy from the sun but prohibits energy from leaving the Earth. And so pretty quickly, our nicely balanced climate became imbalanced. In the century, as the amount of CO2, in the atmosphere has increased, Earth’s global mean surface temperature has ticked up from 14 to 15 degrees Celsius.
“This is called climate change. Climate change due to human activities is now firmly established by the observed facts and the laws of physics. The consequences of the phenomenon are becoming self-evident, but so are, I’d argue, the capabilities of the new generation of scientists to find a way forward.”
Shukla says in the book, on average, the Earth expels approximately 122,000 trillion watts of energy into space annually, which is roughly equivalent to the energy it receives from the sun. This equilibrium between outgoing and incoming energy is what establishes the average climate on our planet. For nearly ten millennia, the balance between incoming and outgoing energies was so well maintained that the global annual average temperature remained a comfortable 14 degrees Celsius, allowing life to persist and humanity to flourish.
On Venus, this equilibrium results in an annual average temperature of 464 degrees Celsius. This is not unexpected, considering Venus’s proximity to the sun. However, there is another significant factor, aside from the energy a planet receives from the sun that affects climate: the chemical composition of its atmosphere. On Venus, carbon dioxide constitutes 95 percent of the atmosphere. In contrast, Earth’s atmosphere contains approximately 0.04 percent carbon dioxide—or at least, it did.
The book is meticulously crafted and filled with complex details about climate events, representing a significant effort that the author labels as chaos theory. Its importance is evident in a world facing the pressing challenge of addressing the devastating impacts of climate change.
For anyone who cares about the health of our planet, this book is a must-read.
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Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of Cyclones in Odisha: Landfall, Wreckage and Resilience, Unbiased, No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.
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