The burning heat of Las Vegas would be unliveable without the air conditioning that only contributes to the overheating climate. Our generated light, powered by the energy we have inherited from our planet’s prehistory, turns night into day, cold into heat, and vice versa: we have never been meekly content with the Earth that we inherited. Yet we humans insist on colonising places unfit for human habitation, determined to extend our dominion. The waves seem to beat more gently, the birds fly more slowly. Under the penetrating gaze of a yellow-eyed Arctic owl, the curator of the Svalbard Museum tells us, “These light nights are strange. As Redniss notes, “It would seem to make no sense to live in such a place – a place where it is too cold to be born, too cold to die.” Natural life slows down, limited by the restricted polar light. There is no gynaecologist at its hospital. In Svalbard, further east along the Arctic Circle, the other end of life is equally problematic. Hunters whose companions have died in winter have to share their huts with their deceased friends, for fear that bears or wolves prowling outside will dig up the corpses and feast upon them. In the frozen North, it is not floods that threaten the dead, but predators on the ice. For a white explorer, the day can prove more dangerous, inducing snow blindness. In Canada’s Arctic, the Inuit believe that a sleeping person’s eyeballs move with them wherever they go in their dreams. The living looked on as the dead were lost twice over. “Most people expect their loved ones, once they’re buried, to remain that way,” Redniss comments. Sue Flewelling, the cemetery commissioner, and Elizabeth Bundock, the state medical examiner, faced the gruesome task of trying to reunite these remains with their identities, often resorting to DNA analysis or even asking relatives about distinguishing features of the deceased.

Like something out of a tale by Washington Irving, bones were borne out by the flood and into the fields. As it hit Vermont, the tempest invaded Woodlawn Cemetery in Rochester, sweeping out the dead from their eternal rest. Using eyewitness accounts, Redniss relates a gothic side-effect of Hurricane Irene, which swept up from the Caribbean to New England in August 2011. The book begins startlingly, throwing us into the eye of the storm, with an arresting image. In doing so, she provides a synoptic view of the weather, and what it means to us.

Dividing her large-format volume into all-encompassing sections – Chaos, Cold, Rain, Dominion, Pleasure – Redniss deftly recasts the forecast by looking backwards as well as ahead. In her extraordinary new book, Redniss presents a graphic non-fiction work (rather than a novel) that succeeds where other polemics fail: by drawing the reader into a world elementally defined, and exquisitely portrayed. How do you write tellingly about something as amorphous as the climate? Or, indeed, about a subject so politically freighted? Writer and artist Lauren Redniss has the answer.

Lauren redniss thunder and lightning