Odds Against Tomorrow (2013) by Nathaniel Rich

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2013).

  • Odds Against Tomorrow is an apocalyptic fiction novel by American writer Nathaniel Rich, published in 2013, and set in New York City in the future. The main protagonist is a young, gifted mathematician named Mitchell Zukor who is good at making predictions and calculating the cost of disasters. Zukor accepts a job with a financial consulting firm called FutureWorld after a major earthquake destroyed Seattle. Zukor was working on cost assessment of natural disasters, ecological collapses, financial crises, and wars, when he personally experienced the ‘worst-case scenario’ – the damage and flooding of New York City by a category 4 hurricane.
  • Author Nathaniel Rich had already completed his in-depth research and writing of Odds Against Tomorrow when superstorm Sandy hit New York City in October 2012. Seeing the actual horrible images of flooded Manhattan felt to Rich “like the book had been adapted for television by every cable news station,” and that a disaster of this magnitude had already been accurately predicted.  

How is this related to climate?

  • Odds Against Tomorrow has been called “the first great climate-change novel” because it portrays the impact of a catastrophic storm fueled by global climate change. As more water is evaporated due to increased global surface temperatures, the water vapor in the atmosphere becomes a powerful fuel for the development of intense storms, including extreme tropical systems or hurricanes with fast rotating winds. Under warmer conditions, hurricanes not only have stronger winds and more rain, but also affect higher latitudes, such as hurricane Sandy that impacted New York City, USA (image below).
    • At its peak intensity, hurricane Sandy was a category 3 storm, and with tropical-storm-force winds stretching 1,850 km (or 1,150 miles) in diameter it was the largest recorded Atlantic hurricane by size. It caused the death of more than 230 people and almost $70 billion in damages within 8 countries from the Caribbean region in the south, all the way to Canada in the north.   
    • Hurricane Sandy hit New York City on October 29, 2012, as a category 1 storm that claimed 44 lives, and resulted in $19 billion in damages, flooding of close to 90,000 buildings, and temporary displacement of thousands of New Yorkers. The storm left about 2 million New York residents without power, access to food, drinking water, healthcare, and other services. 

Flooding in the Lower Manhattan Financial District of New York City in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy (from Sandy and Its Impact, 2013).

  • Based on maximum sustained wind speed, hurricanes are rated in categories 1 to 5 according to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale (table and video below). With ongoing climate change and the resulting increased amount of heat in the atmosphere and warmer ocean surface temperatures, wind speeds in tropical storms are increasing as well. As the result of research published in 2024, a new hurricane category 6 has been proposed, with minimum wind speeds of 309 km/h or 192 mph.

Table (above) and video (below) describing and illustrating the types of damage by winds belonging to hurricane categories 1 to 5 according to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale (from National Hurricane Center and Central Pacific Hurricane Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).

 

References and additional resources