Excerpt from Rain by Cynthia Barnett, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

These paradoxes could not be more urgent today, as we figure out how to adapt to the aberrant rainfall and storm patterns, increasingly severe flooding, and more-extreme droughts wrought by climate change. Globally, the continents recently drew the two heaviest years of rainfall since record-keeping began. Scientists are bewildered by the controversy over whether human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are to blame for the precipitation extremes. Increased greenhouse gases push temperatures higher. Higher temperatures cause greater evaporation—and therefore greater rainfall—where water exists. They make it hotter and drier where it does not.

Climate change frightens and divides us, to such an extent that many people simply refuse to talk about it all. But everyone loves to talk about the rain. Too much and not enough, rain is a conversation we share. It is an opening to connect—in ways as profound as prayer and art, practical as economics, or casual as an exchange between strangers on a stormy day. Rain brings us together in one of the last untamed encounters with nature that we experience routinely, able to turn the suburbs and even the city wild.

Huddled with our fellow humans under construction scaffolding to escape a deluge, we are bound in the memory and mystery of exhilarating, confounding, life-giving rain.

Excerpted from Rain by Cynthia Barnett. Copyright © 2015 by Cynthia Barnett. Excerpted by permission of Crown. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.