Book Review: Storm World – Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming
Reviewed by: Lynn Peterson
Rating: Must Read
Losing a major US city ought to be a wake up call to Americans that something has gone wrong. Following the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Chris Mooney explores the connection between global warming and increased hurricane strength in Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. In the wake of Katrina, politicians and the news media seized on the question of whether Global Warming caused the record-breaking hurricane season of 2005. However, are politicians, who need to please their constituency to get reelected, and the news media that needs to sell stories, really the best sources for determining the connection?
Mooney’s book has value in that he skips the party-line rhetoric and sensationalist media and interviews the meteorologists, the people best qualified to understand hurricanes and their influencing factors. Notably, he talks with William Gray, Chris Landsea, and Kerry Emanuel, meteorologists all on differing sides of the debate.
Mooney drives home the point that whether or not global warming is manmade or a naturally occurring phenomenon and whether or not it has any impact on tropical weather systems, the fact is that we do live in a storm world. Tropical storms and hurricanes are going to occur. They are going to strike our cities. With so many people living in harm’s way, the question should really be, what are we going to do about it? “So whatever we do about global warming, we should be preparing ourselves for hurricanes (including possibly stronger ones) no matter what.”
While Mooney does discuss the faulty levee system that ostensibly caused the massive flooding in New Orleans, I wish he had delved a little deeper into engineering solutions our coastal cities can use to protect and safely evacuate their populations. That said, Storm World is particularly thought-provoking, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about the science behind hurricanes and the relation to global warming.
