Going in the right direction

BOOKS & ARTS Tempestuous times Alexandra Witze Is there scientific evidence of the link between climate change and hurricanes? STORM WORLD: HURRICANES, POLITICS AND THE BATTLE OVER GLOBAL WARMING By Chris Mooney Harcourt: 2007. 400 pp. $26.00 In April, the journal Science published an opinion piece arguing that scientists need to be more effective at ‘framing’ their arguments for different audiences if they hope to have a real impact on policy or society (Science 316, 56; 2007). Its authors — communications professor Matt Nisbet and writer Chris Mooney, both of Washington DC — reasoned that on topical issues of importance to society, such as climate change, the average reader does not form an opinion by weighing up the evidence from different sources, but instead uses predisposed values to screen their choices accordingly. As such, public understanding of science is often framed by subjective interpretations of information. The piece triggered a firestorm of argument, with most of the dispute boiling down to cynicism over whether such ‘framing’ constituted anything more than simply placing spin on an idea. But the issue of framing rhetoric with experience or expectation may well rebound on one of the authors of the Science piece now. Mooney, who is the Washington correspondent for Seed magazine, is perhaps best known for his 2005 book The Republican War on Science, which enumerated multiple failings of the US Republican Party — the Grand Old Party —and its dealings with scientific topics. The book eloquently captured the mood of many in the US scientific establishment at the time, when numerous researchers were speaking out about the perceived manipulation of science by the Bush administration and its cronies. The Republican War on Science was, in fact, so successful that anything Mooney now does will doubtless be measured by its standard. His latest effort, a book on hurricanes, will, in essence, be viewed by many through the lens of his earlier work on the politicization of science. Throw in the fact that Mooney is from New Orleans, and one might well expect a certain outcome: a doomsday excoriation of Republicans for their ineptness in dealing with hurricane Katrina, and of scientists for not getting their message across to the public more convincingly. That assertion would be wrong. In place of a political diatribe, Mooney has written a straightforward and very serviceable account of the study of hurricanes and whether their intensity, frequency or other characteristics are changing due to global warming. Storm World reads, in fact, like a story any other qualified science journalist would write about the topic. Yes, it opens with the lingering devastation of the New Orleans house of Mooney’s mother, and there is the occasional glimmer of political tension — such as when NASA’s Jim Hansen accuses the Bush administration of muzzling his statements over global warming. Yet those elements never dominate the book. Instead, Storm World relies on the good old-fashioned components of science writing: a dose of history, some colourful characters, and a clash of viewpoints as the scientific process evolves. The first third of the book is devoted to a history of hurricane research. This grounding is useful in setting up the debates that follow. Mooney traces the evolution of the players from early observation-driven meteorologists who try to tackle the dynamics of hurricane formation, to later theoreticians who invoke equations of wind speed and heat transfer. Interestingly, one of the tensions he sets up is between Herbie Riehl — one of the great early hurricane observers, who helped pioneer the notion of flying instrument-laden aircraft into storms — and the MIT theoretician Jule Charney, who quantified the processes through which hurricanes form and gain their strength. nature reports climate change | VOL 4 | SEPTEMBER 2007 | www.nature.com/reports/climatechange Riehl and Charney provide a fitting historical parallel for the two main protagonists who feature in the bulk of Mooney’s tale: Colorado State University hurricane forecaster William Gray, and MIT physicist Kerry Emanuel. Gray, whose main role in life these days seems to be as a global-warming sceptic, was Riehl’s student. Emanuel, who probably knows more about tropical cyclone physics than anyone on the planet, was a student of Charney. The real meat of Storm World is devoted to the ferocious Atlantic hurricane seasons of 2004, 2005 and 2006. These years saw record numbers of storms, and bore witness to unprecedented infighting between various groups of hurricane researchers. The set-up of Emanuel versus Gray is a bit artificial, but provides a convenient backdrop for the ensuing tense developments. Emanuel is the author of a key paper (Nature 436, 686–688; 2005) positing that hurricanes have grown more intense in recent decades because of rising sea-surface temperatures. Gray is the selfappointed ‘debunker’ who used to wind Emanuel up at public symposia — until the relationship between the two deteriorated to the point that they no longer appeared at the same events. Mooney fleshes out the debate with other characters, such as Gray’s former student Greg Holland, who as a young Australian forecaster watched Cyclone Tracy destroy the city of Darwin. Once sceptical of the link between hurricanes and global warming, Holland has in recent years become a convert, in part because of the work by his Australian friend Peter Webster and colleagues (Science 309, 1844–1846; 2005). Mooney accurately sketches some of the key moments of tension in the hurricane debate, such as the 2006 conference in Monterey, California, that featured Webster and Holland taking turns to bombard Gray with questions on 57 BOOKS & ARTS his presentation. To add a little more fuel to the fire, there’s Gray’s former student Chris Landsea, who argues that the historical record of Atlantic hurricanes is too patchy to make any definitive conclusions about trends in intensity or frequency of storms. Mooney doesn’t miss a detail, down to the little hurricane spirals that replace flowers in Landsea’s favoured Hawaiian-style shirts. Still, Mooney is just a bit too much in thrall of Gray, a cranky and colourful personality with time to spare for visiting journalists. But by the end, he has accurately painted Gray as increasingly isolated from his fellow scientists, and for good reason. But one occasionally wishes for a little less Gray and a little more of the other key players — such as Tom Knutson of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, a hurricane researcher who has reportedly experienced pressure to play down his findings. One also wishes for a lengthier discussion of the global picture of tropical cyclone formation; Mooney’s blog, The Intersection, (scienceblogs.com/ intersection) often contains fascinating tidbits about current cyclones that are littlementioned in Western media. Storm World could have used more (...truncated)