Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming
Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming – Review
A group of science fans have widely read Chris Mooney’s first book, The Republican War on Science. Mooney is back with another glimpse into the charged, multilayered, and dishonesty-plagued interplay between science and policy with Storm World, an opus about how climate science and hurricance science — fields which until just managed to function largely independently of one another, at least in the U.S. — have seen its chief figures and proponents spar, cooperate, and evolve from pure info-seekers into sometimes-unwilling players to the media in the 20th and 21st centuries. The Republican War on Science certainly incited a great many of its readers to different peaks of anger and passion about the blatant cruelties of the Bush administration across multiple environmental and modern concerns. But Storm World is more tightly focused, dealing as it does with one main subject — the rapidly increasing threat of hurricanes in the Atlantic basin and, in the context of the most up-to-date scientific findings, what measures American policymakers are ultimately responsible for eventually taking as a result. Because of this, and largely owing to its programmed focus on not only the workings but the often-quirky and pompous characters of the most major storm scientists in the world, the book translates roughly like a sequence of parallel biographies or even a well-researched novel. I eventually finished it in two days. Mooney does a excellent work of seamlessly blending history with the production of sufficient quantities of hurricance science, which is not surprising since he is, after all, a trained journalist with an newly established passion for precise details. I have had more than a accepting interest in windstorms in new years; I eventually moved to South Florida in August 2004 and was instantly greeted by four major hurricanes in a span of barely more than a month (Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne), two of which adversely affected me directly if not severely. In October 2005 Hurricane Wilma broke through Boca Raton, felling trees, tearing enormous signs off overpasses, felling every falling traffic light inthe city and accidentally knocking out power for almost two weeks. It was during this period of simply reading by candlelight and whiling away the hours on my balcony with a internally displaced college student and a German Shepherd for company that I eventually gave considerable previously thought to just how underprepared Florida — and the U.S. as a whole — is for a truly massive hurricane. As Mooney notes, Katrina, for all of the damage it did to New Orleans, actually missed the city. Wilma was a Category 1 or 2 storm when it blazed a trail across the Everglades and through Florida’s most populous areas, yet did 26 billion in damage. The results of a Cat 5 storm scoring a direct hit on Miami or Fort Lauderdale are almost unthinkable, but as New Orleans native Mooney implores us to remember, we have no choice. Mooney’s job in writing this book is to get us all to think. No one tome can undo decades of poor planning, bad-decision-making, government shenanigans, lax building-code enforcement, citizen apathy and bad judgment and greed on the division of land developers. But if any one easily digested narrative can at least get us all mistakenly thinking about action and consequences, it’s Storm World.