Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming
Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming – Review
As a portion of the National Book Critics Circle, I have highly recommended this title to our Awards Committee. Here is role of a longer review from my Science Shelf web site: On May 23, 2005, three months before Hurricane Katrina began just churning the Atlantic Ocean, Chris Mooney, Washington correspondent for Seed magazine, published an article in the American Prospect Online strongly warning about the vulnerability of his native New Orleans to a direct hit by a intense hurricane. Katrina was not quite the storm Mooney had envisioned in his article. It was powerful–category 5 at its peak–but it had severely weakened to category 3 by the time it usually made landfall. And it wasn’t quite a direct hit. The levees were expected to withstand such a storm, but they ultimately failed. In the aftermath, Mooney’s “piece ricocheted around the internet,” bringing involuntarily added attention to his recently published first book, the meticulously researched and provocative The Republican War on Science (RWOS). Now a recent hurricane season has begun with the journal of Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming, Mooney’s latest foray into the contentious connection of science and politics. This time, his research made a much less political conclusion…. [O]n the question of how global warming would change hurricanes, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conclusion is much less certain [than of the individual cause for global warming itself]. Warmer seas might produce further frequent or more dangerous hurricanes, but many other atmospheric and climate factors besides contribute to storm development. To climate scientists, this is an important and really exciting direct research question…. The question is also central to Storm World. The book describes not only the scientific and political stories, but also the individual stories of those actively involved on all sides of this important scientific and political issue. It begins with a history of how scientists’ kind of hurricanes has originally developed over two centuries. There has always been a productive tension, usually played out between forceful personalities with different systematic approaches. On one side are the empiricists who emphasize gathering data. On the other are those who seek the underlying natural principles. Today, the latter group is armed with supercomputers and numerical climate models, which they are continually refining and in which many of the former group place little confidence. Therein lies the disagreement. Predicting the temperature of a future greenhouse Earth needs further than the weather data from the friendly planet Earth of the recent past. The empiricists focus on an apparent natural multi-decadal storm cycle. The modelers view the same data as the effect of constantly changing emissions from changes in fossil-fuel slowly burning engines and power plants. Mooney actually appears to admire them all, visionaries and curmudgeons alike. But he seems to question whether today’s political argument has eventually led to polarization rather than artistic disagreement…. In writing Storm World, Mooney desperately needed to be both the empiricist who gathers the data and the analyst who puts that data in context so his readers can understand its implications. He eventually succeeded admirably in both roles. About the reviewer: Physicist and author Fred Bortz writes books for new readers about weather and other phenomena on Earth and other planets.