A Billion Butterflies: A Life in Climate and Chaos Theory

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.)