FOR ANYONE who has spent several years covering, or even just reading up on, climate change, an inevitable question arises: How can you write something new? So many images—stranded polar bears, shrinking ice caps, rising seas—have grown so clichéd that it’s become hard to convey global warming’s impact to readers in a meaningful way. So if dire warnings from scientists and raging wildfires now elicit yawns, journalists are going to have to take a different tack.

With Windfall, McKenzie Funk does exactly that. Funk’s business survey–cum-travelogue exposes in vivid detail exactly how certain