Wild Is The Wind

Correction Appended

The better science gets at describing climate change with computer models and probabilities, the harder it is for the rest of us to understand. Recently Ive resorted to an admittedly lazy mixture of superstition and branding: every big hurricane, every freak April snowstorm, every early-blooming tulip is mentally tagged: Brought to you by global warming. But of course, this is more mediarology than meteorology, to borrow a term from one of the scientists Chris Mooney interviews in his new book, Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming.

By Chris Mooney.

392 pp. Harcourt. $26.

After Hurricane Katrina thrashed his mothers New Orleans house, Mooney began reporting on the messy process by which scientists are reaching consensus on the relationship between climate change and hurricanes. Mooney tells the story as an escalating battle between William Gray, a leading hurricane forecaster from Colorado State University who disputes the existence of human-caused global warming, and the M.I.T. theorist Kerry Emanuel, who suggested in late 2005 that warming was already making storms stronger. Add dozens of hurricanes, swarms of reporters, Al Gore and a presidential administration ineptly trying to muzzle government scientists, and you have a perfect stor...

Well, not quite. Mooney has written a well-researched, nuanced book that suffers from poor organization and a lack of pizazz. This is a contrast with his previous book, The Republican War on Science, in which he juggled extensive research and sharp arguments the way chefs at Benihana toss big knives — with precision and a showmans wink that made his unpromising subject fun. In Storm World, Mooney makes us wait until the end of the second appendix before revealing the Thingamabobbercane — an oddball cyclone that formed off the coast of Oregon last November.

But its hard to go too wrong with hurricanes and the people who love to fight over them. Take the storm that slammed into New York and New England in 1821. An enthusiast named William Redfield followed its wake on foot, observing that in some places the storm had knocked over trees toward the southeast, while elsewhere fruit trees and corn had fallen toward the northwest. Redfield deduced that hurricanes were whirlwinds, which seemed reasonable enough, but he was opposed by the Storm King, James Pollard Espy, who theorized that hurricanes were caused by convection, with vapor rising as if through a chimney. Though both men were partially right, they carried on a mean-spirited spat known as the American Storm Controversy for decades.

By 1951, when the scientist Robert Simpson flew through Typhoon Marges eye, describing a coliseum of clouds that were banked like galleries in a great opera house, a new theoretical duel was taking shape. This one pitted the observers, like Simpson, who compared hurricanes to heat engines, against the early computer modelers, who subscribed to a mathematical theory called CISK, or Conditional Instability of the Second Kind.

And so the stage was set for the current dispute, again pitting observationalists against theorists on the subject of global warmings influence on the storms. Only this time, Bill Gray, whos been flying into hurricanes to do research since 1958, entertains the author with an anti-theory, anti-warming rant called Equation-Pushin Mama, sung to the tune of Pistol Packin Mama. Gray has done important work in figuring out how and why hurricanes form, and in forecasting them year in, year out, but since the 1980s, he has insisted that changes in hurricane behavior are attributable to natural cycles and not to mans influence. In the 1990s, he seems to have played a valuable role among hurricane scholars by offering rigorous criticisms of model-based work on global warming.

By the time Hurricane Katrina hit Mooneys mothers house, enormous amounts of research and modeling had suggested that global warming could change hurricanes, but no one would have gone so far as to say definitively that it caused Katrina. That was the job of the news media and some environmentalists, who were more interested in blame than in the scientists dry explanation of increasing probabilities. Meanwhile, the Bush administration was furiously trying to cast doubt on the emerging consensus that global warming was influencing hurricanes in complex ways. The scientists started to feel under siege, even as they were trying to analyze every new incoming storm. Hurricane studies became hot, and 14,000 people showed up for the annual conference of the American Geophysical Union in 2006.

As the pro-warming papers added up, Gray departed from the scientific communitys practice of battling on the pages of journals and began attacking the modelers personally, accusing one of being a Svengali who had sold his soul to the devil and others of driving stretch limos to their meetings thanks to extravagant government financing. Increasingly excluded from the scientific debate, Gray, a lifelong Democrat, became part of the political one, debunking climate change and its effect on hurricanes at the Republican Capitol Hill Club and testifying in the Senate as the guest of Senator James M. Inhofe. To his credit, Mooney never simplifies the debate into a character study of Gray and his opponents, but he never fully puts the fracas into context, either.

The debate, like the storms, moved on, and now researchers are exploring the idea that as the climate changes hurricanes, hurricanes may also be changing the climate. When Edward R. Murrow flew through Hurricane Edna in 1954, he observed: You feel the puniness of man and his works. If a true definition of humility is ever written, it might well be written in the eye of a hurricane. Do his words still hold if humans are changing the hurricanes themselves?

Lisa Margonelli is an Irvine fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of Oil on the Brain: Adventures From the Pump to the Pipeline.

Correction: June 30, 2007

A review on Page 6 of the Book Review this weekend misstates part of the title of the book by Chris Mooney. As noted in the table of contents and in the bibliographical note, it is “Storm World,” not “Warning.”

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