Storm World

A couple of years ago I received a copy of Chris Mooney's "Storm World" and packed it in my carry-on to read on travel.
This month I finally read it, and about time too.

Storm World
Hurricanes, Politics and the Battle Over Global Warming
by Chris Mooney
Harcourt Inc
ISBN 978-0-15-101287-9

Storm World follows Chris's debut work, The Republican War on Science, and was written in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the 2005 Atlantic Hurricane season.
It is a timely, well written and very interesting book.

The approach is largely historical and from the perspective of following the back-and-forth between some key players on the "different sides"
- on the one hand meteorology orientated field scientists, who focus on observations and statistical trends and correlations in data;
on the other hand, the more physics oriented modelers, who focus on processes and simulations.

The arena of conflict is the effect of global climate change on hurricanes, their frequency, intensity and location; and to some extent the potential effect of hurricanes on climate and their role in latitudonal heat transport and vertical ocean heat transport.

It makes for an interesting story, with interesting characters and nice journalistic conflict.
Chris works some of his favourite themes in framing and role of scientists in presenting science and guiding policy.
It also comes through, and Chris admits as much, that his emotional sympathy is with the meteorologists, even though he agrees scientifically more with the modelers.

It was a fun read, and I am sorry I didn't get to it earlier, but at least you can now get it in paperback...

My one major criticism is that the book really needed for photos and figures: photos of some of the key personalities would have been welcome, especially "action shots", and I was disappointed not to see photos of hurricane hunter planes in action.
Also, more photos of actual hurricanes, especially the outliers, and their effects would have been useful - not that this ought to have been a "coffee table book", but a large fraction of the target readership would benefit from many more pictures.
Also, in the conclusions, graphic illustrations of the predicted scenarios, like sea level changes around US coastlines, or impact maps for the New York or Miami metropolitan areas would have been valuable.

Another omission I would have liked to have seen more of is a discussion of the role of climate observing satellites, in particular both the NOAA satellites and the NASA Earth Observing satellites, and what the future is for these.

But that's quibbling.
I highly recommend the book, and if you haven't read it, you should.