Category Five
Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them
-
- $19.99
Publisher Description
Superstorms, hurricanes, typhoons, and spiraling freak weather: the fallout of global warming is a real-life natural thriller, as captured in Porter Fox’s urgent and stunning story of chasing the world’s most devastating storms.
Here is the story of the largest storms on earth and how those storms are growing bigger and stronger. The tale of extreme weather doesn’t begin with floods, fires, or even the air that carries this change to our lives. It begins with the ocean. Oceans create weather, climate, floods, droughts, and most of the geophysical fallout of global warming. Exactly how, award-winning writer Porter Fox contends, depends on invisible ocean currents, planetary cycles just now being defined, and processes in the deep ocean that may well have already saved us from the worst effects of the climate crisis. In an attempt to avert a coming age of superstorms, sea level rise, and catastrophic warming, scientists followed the lead of a college drop-out-turned-maverick sailor and storm-chaser; a Romanian refugee turned BBC radio host turned circumnavigating mapmaker; and an audacious new attempt to study storms above as well as deep below the ocean depths, using drones.
Throughout Category Five, Fox shadows these explorers, scientists, oceanographers, and weather forecasters in an attempt to understand, forestall, and possibly harness the awesome power of our oceans.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
By combining gripping accounts of sailing voyages through raging storms with fascinating background on how climate scientists are studying extreme weather, Fox (The Last Winter) delivers a report that's as entertaining as it is informative. He notes that for decades, sailors have been raising the alarm that centuries-old rules of thumb for navigating the sea are losing their predictive value as climate change transforms the ocean. This can lead to dangerous consequences, Fox contends, providing a harrowing description of how in 1991, sailor John Kretschmer endured 80 mile-per-hour winds and torrential rain after getting caught in a category three hurricane despite sailing outside "typical hurricane generation zones" near Bermuda. Fox explains that as CO2 warms the atmosphere, the heat intensifies the process by which energy is transferred from the ocean to the air, which in turn exacerbates the differences in air pressure that generate wind and make severe storms more common. Exploring scientific efforts to better understand how global warming is changing the ocean, Fox details oceanographer Adrienne Sutton's work with Richard Jenkins's Saildrone company to develop unmanned vessels capable of taking CO2 and temperature measurements even in the middle of a hurricane. Filled with enlightening climate science and exciting adventure writing, this thrills.
