Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming (Hardcover)

by Chris Mooney (Author) "Communities and nations, and especially their ships and navies, have been ravaged by hurricanes from time immemorial..." (more)
Key Phrases: best track data, hurricane intensification, tropical cyclone report, National Hurricane Center, United States, New Orleans (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Having witnessed Katrina's devastation of his mother's New Orleans house, science writer Mooney (The Republican War on Science) became concerned that government policy still ignored worst-case scenarios in planning for the future, despite that unprecedented disaster. He set out to explore the question of whether global warming will strengthen or otherwise change hurricanes in general, even if it can't explain the absolute existence, attributes, or behavior of any single one of them. Since storm research's early 19th-century inception, Mooney found, there has been a split between those who believed the field should be rooted in the careful collection of data and observations (e.g., weathermen) and those who preferred theory-based deductions from the laws of physics (e.g., climatologists). Whirling around this longstanding antagonism is a mix of politics, personalities and the drama of these frightening storms. The urgency and difficulty of resolving the question of global warming's existence, and its relationship to storms, has only heated things up. Mooney turns this complicated stew into a page-turner, making the science accessible to the general reader, vividly portraying the scientists and relating new discoveries while scientists and politicians change sides—or stubbornly ignore new evidence. Mooney draws hope from some researchers' integration of both research methods and concludes that to be effective, scientists need to be clear communicators. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by John McQuaid

To most Americans, the annual hurricane season used to be a kind of background noise -- part of the usual summer cable news fare of celebrity scandals and disappearing young women. But in August 2005, Hurricane Katrina changed all that. Katrina's images -- New Orleans under water, its residents trapped and pleading for help from rooftops, freeway overpasses and the Superdome -- shook our faith in the government's ability to perform its most fundamental task, protecting people. And Katrina was merely the worst of a record-setting hurricane season, which generated so many storms the National Hurricane Center ran out of names. Coming as scientific evidence mounted for the human role in global warming, the storms seemed a harbinger of bigger disasters to come. Suddenly, hurricanes mattered.

Enter the talented science journalist Chris Mooney with Storm World, which skillfully anatomizes the scientific and political debate over hurricanes and global warming. Mooney's previous book, The Republican War on Science, explored the ways that ideologues and special interests allied with the GOP undermined the government's scientific enterprises. Storm World echoes War in some ways, recounting the Bush administration's ham-handed attempts to muzzle government hurricane scientists. But it's a different kind of book than its predecessor: not a big statement, but a blow-by-blow account of a scientific debate unfolding simultaneously in the academy and the real world.

Mooney convincingly portrays that debate as a classic paradigm shift in progress. On one side, climate scientists using sophisticated computer models find more and more evidence for a link that seems intuitive -- warmer air and warmer seas fuel bigger (but, interestingly, not more) hurricanes. On the other, a group of respected hurricane forecasters -- who know it's hard to predict what will happen next week, let alone a century from now -- say those climate models are inherently unreliable, and that the data to demonstrate such a connection just don't exist. Storm World tracks the arguments as they evolve -- quite rapidly -- against the dramatic background of the 2005 hurricane season and into 2006. Shocking findings are unveiled, and several prominent scientists abandon their skepticism to support the idea of a link between hurricanes and global warming.

Storm World does a good job explaining the fundamentals of hurricane science and the ways different scientists approach it. Twenty years ago, for example, MIT's Kerry Emanuel wrote the first paper suggesting that climate change might fuel bigger hurricanes. He looks at the global climate as a single, evolving system in which big hurricanes play some as yet unclear role. At one point, Emanuel's modeling led him to speculate that "hypercanes" -- giant hurricanes possibly triggered by the Yucatan asteroid strike 65 million years ago -- might have helped kill off the dinosaurs.

But in tackling at least four distinct themes -- hurricane science, media hype, global warming politics, disaster policy -- Mooney seems uncertain of exactly what his principal thrust should be. He works hard to weave the strands together, but often they don't quite mesh. For instance, he devotes a lot of space to Colorado meteorologist William Gray's quixotic crusade to disprove global warming. Gray rejects the broad scientific consensus that global warming is happening. But he's still a big name in the world of meteorology, and he has raised a ruckus by accusing fellow scientists, including some of his former students, of ignorance, opportunism or both for suggesting that a warming atmosphere may fuel stronger hurricanes. He's undeniably colorful. But Gray also comes off as something of a crank, and marginal to the substantive scientific debate on the connection between warming and storms.

Storm World is at its most cogent on the author's favorite issue: science in the noisy public square. Many hurricane scientists reacted with dismay when their subtle arguments were distorted by press accounts or used to score partisan points in the political storm that erupted after Katrina. One declared he'll become "a bloody hermit on a mountaintop" the next time he publishes a paper. But Georgia Tech climate scientist Judith Curry decided that maybe it's the tradition-bound rules of academia that are out of sync with today's wired world, and that perhaps scientists should learn how to communicate in the age of blogs and the 24/7 news cycle. That would help the public and politicians gain a deeper understanding of the hurricane threat -- which, Mooney regrettably concludes, looks as if it will indeed be getting worse.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (July 2, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151012873
• ISBN-13: 978-0151012879
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #279,197 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Science writing at its best, July 1, 2007

By	Judith A. Curry - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

To provide a frame of reference for this review, I and my colleagues Peter Webster and Greg Holland are among the scientists that are featured prominently in Storm World. Our involvement in the issue of hurricanes and global warming began when we published an article in Science shortly before the landfall of Hurricane Rita, where we reported a doubling of the number of category 4 and 5 hurricanes globally since 1970. When Chris Mooney first approached me with his idea for writing a book on this topic, I was somewhat skeptical. I couldn't see how this could be accomplished given the rapid changes in the science (I was worried the book would be outdated before it was published), the complexities of the technical aspects of the subject, a concern about how the individual scientists would be treated and portrayed, and a concern that the political aspects of the issue would be handled in a partisan way. Over the course of the past year and a half, it became apparent that Mooney was researching this issue extremely thoroughly and was developing a good grasp of both the history and technical aspects of the subject. Upon finally reading the book, I can only say Storm World has far exceeded any hope or expectation that I could have had for a book on this subject. The book is surprisingly rich in technical detail, and Mooney has grasped the nuances of the breadth of scientific arguments and uncertainties. He provides a fascinating history with rich insights into the current controversy. The individual scientists are portrayed accurately as well as sympathetically and colorfully. The political aspects are treated in an insightful and nonpartisan manner. I am most impressed by the fresh insights provided by this book, which besides being a "good read," Storm World is an important and timely contribution that deserves careful consideration in the dialogue and debate on hurricane policy in the U.S. Storm World is science journalism at its absolute best.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Science Book of 2007 So Far, July 20, 2007

By	John Kwok (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

"Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming" is the best science book of 2007 which I have read so far, and one which clearly deserves all the praise it has earned already. It is an exceptional piece of science journalism which should earn awards for journalist Chris Mooney, the science writer for the Washingtion, DC-based SEEDS magazine. It is even more impressive a piece of brilliant scientific journalism when you realize that both the author and the magazine he works for have a strong liberal bias - which admittedly was quite apparent in his previous book "The Republican War On Science" - and yet, to his everlasting credit, Mooney has endeavored quite well to ensure that his book remains as nonpartisan as possible, treating with ample respect, all of the principal players depicted, from flamboyant Colorado State University meteorologist William Gray - a staunch critic of global warming - to MIT theoretical meteorologist Kerry Emanuel - among those who recognize a potential link between global warming and hurricane intensity and severity - to Georgia Tech climatologist Judith Curry, a co-author of an important recent paper which may support such a potential linkage. Without question, Mooney's book is a revealing, often insightful, examination of Hurricane meteorological research from 2004 to 2006 and of the relevant political and media issues which become associated with it, regrettably in the aftermath of the widespread destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina.

Mooney offers a vivid portrayal of the history of meteorology, emphasizing research on hurricanes, from the early 19th Century to the present, in the first third of his book. From Mooney's perspective, meteorology is seen as an intellectual struggle between empiricists who've relied exclusively on collecting data and modelers willing to employ complex mathematical equations and computer simulations in trying to get a better understanding for current and future climatic trends. This a distinction that is not unique to meteorology itself, but indeed, in much of science, demonstrating how "messy" a business science can be. But it is an important distinction which Mooney has made simply because these two distinct groups of meteorologists and climatologists have shaped not only the scope, but also, regrettably, the tenor of the debates over the validity of global warming and its possible relevance to the formation, relative severity and frequency of hurricances forming in the North Atlantic Ocean and elsewhere around the globe.

As a graduate student of evolutionary biology and paleobiology nearly twenty years ago, I was keenly aware of the raging debates in these sciences from the tempo and mode of evolution - as expressed in assessing the validity of the evolutionary theory of "Punctuated Equilibrium" and the evolutionary implications of stasis - to kin and group selection, and of course, sociobiology too - and last, but not least, systematic biology (cladistics vs. phenetics vs. "evolutionary" systematics). And yet, none of them - with the possible exception of sociobiology - was as replete with the ample harsh attacks on the data, scientific methods used, and personalities involved as it's been amply demonstrated here by Mooney, in the second section of his book, recounting the recent debates between the empiricists led by William Gray and the "modelers" led by Kerry Emanuel and others. Here Mooney truly excels in letting the partisans from both sides speak for themselves, citing both the relevant important scientific papers and the scientific meetings where several debates were held on the implications of global warming to hurricane research, in a section that will especially interest both historians and sociologists of science.

It's only in the third - and concluding - section of "Storm World" where Mooney finally reveals his own personal bias. Here he recognizes that the data does show a trend towards increasing frequency and severity of hurricanes, at least in the North Atlantic Ocean. But he also realizes that this data doesn't demonstrate definitely, the strong possibility that this trend is due to global warming. And yet, he recognizes the importance of acting to minimise global warming, even though our knowledge and understanding of it with respect to hurricane formation and intensity is still quite speculative. He also commends modelers like Emanuel for constructing testable, data-driven models, in stark contrast to others like Gray who have argued emphatically for relying on an empirical approach to hurricane research. Finally, he offers scientists two intriguing recommendations with regards to pursuing research and on how they can successfully communicate it to politicians and others in the public. He strongly encourages scientists to resist the temptation of being wedded firmly to one particular research methodology - alluding of course to William Gray's blind adherence to empiricism - observing that others may yet be equally important in yielding both new data and fresh insights. He also recommends that scientists become better communicators - and educators - so that those who are the ultimate beneficiaries of their research, both politicans and the general public at large, can make sound, reasonable decisions based upon their understanding of what is indeed good scientific research; it's a recommendation that I can strongly endorse too, especially in light of ongoing efforts to introduce Intelligent Design and other flavors of creationism into American science classrooms as "viable alternatives" to contemporary evolutionary biology.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A meteorologist for 35 years loves it!, July 20, 2007

By	Glenn Schwartz "Meteorologist" (Philadelphia, Pa. USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is amazing. It's so hard to find any book that deals with global warming in any way that doesn't go to one extreme or the other. Instead, Chris Mooney gives a very balanced view of the debate on the global warming/hurricane connection. The science is explained well, and simply enough for a layman, so anyone with even a slight knowledge or hurricanes and/or global warming would follow it easily.
The most interesting part for me is the personal stories of the main scientists involved in the debate. It's easy to assume that anyone who is such a stubborn denier of global warming such as Dr. Bill Gray would be a political conservative. It's clear from this book that he is not. The way politics weighs on such legendary scientists as Drs. Gray and Emanuel is fascinating. No one ever taught us how not to have our views distorted by the media and used for political agendas when we were in college.

Glenn Schwartz
Chief Meteorologist
NBC10 Philadelphia