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

Hurricanes make for exceptional television viewing. Through ever more detailed satellite imagery we track them from their stormy birth off the coast of Africa, watching them grow in size and strength, anxiously anticipating their path. Finally, along with breathless and windblown on-the-scene reporters, we witness the storms' devastating landfall.

Global warming lacks such dramatic immediacy. As much as its overall effects may be more devastating and far-reaching than those of any hurricane, the slow melting of glaciers and the gradual rise in both sea level and global temperature do not make compelling TV.

But when, as Chris Mooney reports in Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming, two of the most active Atlantic hurricane seasons on record -- 2004 and 2005 -- coincided with new research that appeared to connect global warming to the strength and perhaps even the frequency of hurricanes, the interest of the press and the public in climate change was finally aroused. Global warming was armed and dangerous. Mooney quotes the Boston Globe's environmental journalist Ross Gelbspan: "The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming."

But was it? This was not the first time that rising temperatures had been linked with hurricanes. As early as 1987, Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had published studies based on climate models suggesting that as the atmosphere and oceans warmed, hurricane wind strength would increase. At the time, climate modeling was in its infancy, and catastrophic events such as hurricanes were the purview of more practical climatologists and meteorologists who painstakingly gathered data from storms to predict what might come to pass. The éminence grise of this kind of forecasting was William Gray, a Colorado State University atmospheric scientist who took a dim view of climate modeling, referring to Emanuel's work as "playing games."

The feud between those who saw a causal relationship between global warming and hurricane strength and those who did not simmered behind the scenes until July 2005. It was then that Emanuel published his latest modeling results in the preeminent journal Nature, stating that "future warming may lead to an upward trend in tropical cyclone destructive potential." Gray publicly challenged Emanuel, telling the Boston Globe that it was "a terrible paper, one of the worst I've ever looked at." Soon enough, the nuances of the debate were lost.

Mooney spends the first part of the book hashing out the battle between Gray and Emanuel before trying to place their argument in the context of the larger global warming debate, particularly the frustration among scientists over the Bush administration's suppression of work done by government researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. His efforts falter, however, as his analysis of the political debate loses its objectivity. Does it make a difference, as Mooney points out, that Gray appears at a press conference with Senator James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who, "in addition to being a global warming denier ... is a rightwing evangelical Christian" who supports Israel?

Mooney closes with an essay exhorting scientists to learn how to present their data and ideas to the media and the public. Even if scientists were to become better "communicators," the public will still have to rely on journalists like Mooney to make the science intelligible and its implications clear. Unfortunately his book doesn't accomplish that. In the end, Storm World feels like a hasty patchwork of essays, rushed to publication to take advantage of the media's present focus on global warming. As a communicator himself, Mooney should know that science reporting, like science, is not always better for being timely.