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

Copyright 2007 by Chris Mooney

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Mooney, Chris (Chris C.)
Storm world: hurricanes, politics, and the battle over global warming/[Chris Mooney],1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Hurricanes. 2. HurricanesSocial aspects. 3. Global warmingPolitical aspects. 4. Climatology. I. Title.
QC944.M66 2007
363.738'74dc22 2007009742
ISBN 978-0-15-101287-9

e ISBN 978-0-547-41608-3
v3.0414

Meteorology has ever been an apple of contention,
as if the violent commotions of the atmosphere
induced a sympathetic effect on the minds of those
who have attempted to study them.

Smithsonian secretary Joseph Henry,
U.S. Patent Office, Annual Report, Agricultural, 1858

On the day after Christmas 2005, four months after Hurricane Katrina swamped it with polluted water, the neighborhood of Lakeview, New Orleans, showed only the faintest signs of life. Piles of debris sat on each curbside, loose dogs roamed the streets, and the vegetation everywhere was dead. The houses remained almost entirely uninhabited. Some were now hollow shells, gutted by work crews; others still sported interiors that looked as though they had been ransacked by the Creature from the Black Lagooncollapsed floors, stinking refrigerators, disintegrating piles of paper, and huge tapestries of mold on the walls.

My mothers house was one of these. A tree had crashed across the backyard, knocking down a flimsy fence. A sewing machine protruded from beneath a pile of boards. On the side of the house rescue crews had painted a red mark; beneath it had lain the carcass of Mewls, a feral cat my mother had been feeding. Inside, a clock still ticked and the smoke alarm let out occasional bleeps. The floors were spongy, especially in the hallway, which had become a graveyard of congealing paper after a bookcase collapsed. Everything was caked with mud and grime. Substantially damaged is how the city bureaucrats, with their knack for understatement, described it.

Yet despite countless scenes like this, many residents of Lakeview had vowed to return and rebuild their neighborhood. They had grown up in this safe, conservative Catholic community, and couldnt imagine living anywhere else. Outside one battered church a sign read, Behold, I am making all things newand thats just what these New Orleanians planned to do. ReNew Orleans reads the popular T-shirt in town, capturing a passionate sense of devotion to the city and its restoration.

, with maximum sustained winds estimated at about 120 miles per hour, when it made its final landfall near the Louisiana-Mississippi border. Winds experienced in New Orleans werent even at Category 3 strength, since the storm didnt hit the city directly. It missed.

Knowing this, I worried in late 2005 that those charged with rebuilding New Orleans might be paying inadequate attention to the possibility of an even worse hurricane disaster at some point in the future. Not only could a stronger storm come in any season. Considerable, if hotly disputed, evidence suggests we may be entering a world in which, thanks to human-induced global warming, the average hurricane itself becomes more powerful and deadly. The threat to New Orleansand to other vulnerable coastal cities like Miami, Tampa Bay, Houston, Charleston, Providence, New York, and even possibly San Diegocould be steadily rising, along with the sea levels that further amplify hurricane risks.

Out of that sense of concernwhich grew more seasoned and nuanced as I traveled to scientific conferences and learned more about hurricanesarose this book. You might think of it as a homegrown New Orleans science writers idiosyncratic way of coping. Certainly it is no polemic, no work of alarmism. At least as I write these words in late 2006, our scientific understanding of the hurricane-climate relationship remains too incomplete to justify such an approach. Instead, as I examined this ongoing debate through the lens of my own concern, I saw staring back at me the story of how a largely unsuspecting group of scientists had been drawn by politics, the media, the weather, and the history of meteorology itself into a situation of tense conflict more typical of political operatives and opposition researchers (although the scientists by and large acquitted themselves more admirably).

Still, this book was inspired by thoughts of my family and friends who lived or who are still living in New Orleans, and is dedicated to them. So, for that matter, was an article I published on May 23, 2005some hundred days before Katrina formed southeast of the Bahamasentitled Thinking Big About Hurricanes: Its Time to Get Serious About Saving New Orleans. But while the piece ricocheted around the Internet after Katrina, it went largely unnoticed at the time of its publication, like many similar calls of warning.

Thats all past, though; those remaining in my hometown must consider their future, rather than what might once have been done. I only hope that when they do so they will include global warming as part of the pictureprecisely became of the considerable scientific uncertainty about just how severe its consequences will be.

At the outset, let me offer a critical point of clarification: Global warming did not cause Hurricane Katrina, or any other weather disaster. Or to put it more precisely, we just cant say scientifically that global warming either does or does not cause individual weather events. Why? As the climate-scientist writers of RealClimate.org, the leading global-warming blog, observed after Katrina:

We only have one Earth, and it will follow only one of an infinite number of possible weather sequences. It is impossible to know whether or not this event would have taken place if we had not increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as much as we have. Weather events will always result from a combination of deterministic factors (including greenhouse gas forcing or slow natural climate cycles) and stochastic factors (pure chance).

To explain the difference between weather and climate, RealClimate.org used the analogy of rolling a die: You never know whats going to come up on any given roll, but over time and across many rolls, you can get a very good sense of the odds (and thus, whether or not the die is loaded).

With this caveat out of the way, we can get to the central issue: whether global warming will strengthen or otherwise change hurricanes in general, even if it cant explain the absolute existence, attributes, or behavior of any single one of them. To determine the answer, scientists have to consider what they think they know about hurricanes and why they intensify; pore over the statistics theyve compiled on global hurricanes, summed across the various ocean basins where these storms occur; and then determine whether their theory aligns with the data.

There the debate commences. Resolving it on a purely scientific level would be challenging enough to begin with. And thats without the media klieg lights, the brazen political acts of scientific suppression, and the storms slamming the coasts.

The worst Atlantic hurricane season on record still hadnt ended when the American Geophysical Union held its fall meeting in San Francisco in December 2005. Twelve thousand scientists packed themselves into the Moscone Center, the citys space-age mall of a conference facility, for lectures on topics such as the massive 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake and the tsunami that it generated, and data beamed from NASAs Mars rovers and the Cassini spacecraft. Many of the presentations were being given on the centers upper levels, and security guards had to police the towering escalators just to prevent overcrowding.