Product Description

One of the leading science journalists and commentators working today, Chris Mooney delves into a red-hot debate in meteorology: whether the increasing ferocity of hurricanes is connected to global warming. In the wake of Katrina, Mooney follows the careers of leading scientists on either side of the argument through the 2006 hurricane season, tracing how the media, special interests, politics, and the weather itself have skewed and amplified what was already a fraught scientific debate. As Mooney puts it: "Scientists, like hurricanes, do extraordinary things at high wind speeds."Mooney a native of New Orleans has written a fascinating and urgently compelling book that calls into question the great inconvenient truth of our day: Are we responsible for making hurricanes even bigger monsters than they already are?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #854712 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.41" h x 6.35" w x 9.24" l, 1.49 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

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 Booklist
Mooney, whose The Republican War on Science (2005) offered a hard-hitting look at the political manipulation of scientific research, turns his attention to the hot topic of global warming. Does global warming cause increasingly vicious hurricanes? Is human arrogance and disregard for the environment responsible for Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans? Or is this whole idea a lot of hot air? Mooney looks carefully at all sides of the debate, weighing the evidence carefully, telling us not just what's being said but who's saying it and why. Of course, it's impossible to write a book like this without tackling the whole idea of global warming as myth, but Mooney doesn't get bogged down in the politics of that issue. He has different questions to answer: Are the increasingly intense hurricanes of recent years our fault, and if they are, what can we do to change the pattern before it's too late? His answers don't add to cheerful reading, but this is certainly one of the most thought-provoking and accessible accounts of climate change to appear since Katrina. Pitt, David

Review
"The author''s thorough research is evident throughout, and he does a fine job of sifting through complexities and presenting the science in an engaging and readable package. ... In Storm World, Mooney catches real science in the act and, in so doing, weaves a story as intriguing as it is important." (The Los Angeles Times )

"Riveting." (The Boston Globe )

"In Storm World, Mooney serves his readers as both an empiricist who gathers data and an analyst who puts it into context. The result is an important book, whose author succeeds admirably in both his roles." (The Cleveland Plain Dealer )

"... a well-researched, nuanced book ..." (The New York Times )

"Storm World ... skillfully anatomizes the scientific and political debate over hurricanes and global warming." (The Washington Post Book World )