Summary

McKenzie Funk has spent the last six years reporting around the world on how we are preparing for a warmer planet. Funk shows us that the best way to understand the catastrophe of global warming is to see it through the eyes of those who see it most clearly - as a market opportunity.

The physical impacts of global warming can be separated into three broad categories- melt, drought, and deluge. Funk travels to two dozen countries to profile entrepreneurs who view each of these forces as a potential windfall. The melt is a boon for newly arable, mineral-rich regions of the Arctic, such as Greenland - and for the surprising kings of the man-made snow trade, the Israelis. Early attempts at desalination, vital to Israel's survival, produced snow as a by-product. The process is now sold to Alpine countries trying to prolong their ski season.

Drought creates opportunities for private firefighters working for insurance companies in California as well as for fund managers backing South Sudanese warlords who control local farmland. As droughts raise food prices globally, there is no more precious asset.

The deluge - the rising seas, surging rivers, and superstorms that will threaten island nations and coastal cities - has been our most distant concern, but after Hurricane Sandy and failure after failure to cut global carbon emissions, it is not so distant. For Dutch architects designing floating cities and American scientists patenting hurricane defenses, the race is on. For low-lying countries like Bangladesh, the coming deluge presents an existential threat.

Funk visits the front lines of the melt, the drought, and the deluge to make a human accounting of the booming business of global warming. By letting climate change continue unchecked, we are choosing to adapt to a warming world. Containing the resulting surge will be big business; some will benefit, but much of the planet will suffer. McKenzie Funk has investigated both sides, and what he has found will shock us all. To understand how the world is preparing to warm, Windfall follows the money.

'Smart, daring, and darkly funn, Windfall offers a new take on perhaps the world's most intractable problem. McKenzie Funk is a gifted storyteller.' Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe

Praise for Windfall

'Funk is a first-rate storyteller who packs adventure and humor in his journalist's bag and delights in the absurd details of business as unusual. The result is a meticulously researched romp through the back rooms of the climate change industry, by turns thrilling and appalling, and ultimately rather important. There's money under the melting ice, and Funk follows it. Perhaps the only fun book on global climate change you'll ever read.' Charles Graeber, author of The Good Nurse

'Climate change may well be humanity's greatest challenge, but here McKenzie Funk offers definitive evidence that it's also a great way to make a buck. Windfall is a gripping account of how banks, energy companies, engineers, and entrepreneurs have turned a global crisis into a golden opportunity, harvesting short-term profits while sowing the seeds of future ruin. It's an engaging, infuriating, and important story about the way the world works now and about the reasons it may not work at all tomrrow.' Eric Klinenberg, author of Heat Wave and Going Solo

'Exploring the profitable frontiers of climate change, Funk travels the globe like some sort of journalistic special agent, patrolling the melting Arctic on a Canadian battleship one minute, breakfasting with the son of a Sudanese warlord the next. His secret weapons- a highly sensitive irony detector and a satirist's eye for vanities and vices that Twain would have admired. The result is a