| STORM WORLD Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle over Global Warming Chris Mooney New York: Harcourt, Inc., July 2007 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-15-101287-9 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-15-101287-3 | 392p. | HC/GSI | $26.00 | |
| Page 48: | "...he set to work extending the process of dynamic simplification that he had begun in his baroclinic instability paper, filtering out factors, such as fast-moving sound and gravity waves, that were less essential to forecasting the weather." |
| Gravity waves? Does this mean literal waves of gravitic force, or water waves caused by gravity? (I assume the latter.) |
| Page 68: | "In 1983, Sagan and a group of sympathetic scientists theorized that in a situation of nuclear fallout, the atmosphere would fill up with so much dust and smoke that an even greater planetary catastrophe would result." |
| It's not the fallout from the nuclear bombs that concerned Dr. Sagan and his colleagues, but the total heat energy they would deliver to their surroundings — along with the secondary fires they would ignite. |
| Page 80: | Quoting William Gray: "Our philosophy is not to try to understand the physics of hurricane formation..." |
| It is unclear who Gray refers to by "Our." He probably means the Hurricane Center staff, but Mooney does not make this explicit. |
| Page 112: | "Once in our conversation he even said 'e.g.'" |
| Perhaps Emanuel was referring to E. G. Marshall... |
| Pages 107-8: | "Their battle had dramatically amplified in 2004..." |
| Misuse of "amplified." It is a transitive verb. |
| Page 110: | "...on its way to Mahajanga, a Madagascan port that lay to the southeast." |
| My first thought was that this S/B "Madagascaran." However, I checked and it is the correct form (and "Madagascaran" does sound awkward.) |
| Page 125: | "In conclusion, they linked the 1858 San Diego hurricane to seeming record-breaking storms like 2003's Ana and 2004's Catarina." |
| Usage: S/B "seemingly". |
| Page 134: | "The paper, which appeared in Science in June 2005 with the hurricane season already underway, laid out the basic logic." |
| Missing space: S/B "under way". |
| Page 146: | "In short, the technique hones in on the same computer-generated storms that empiricists had so criticized for not adequately resembling real-life hurricanes." |
| Word choice: S/B "homes in on". |
| Page 172: | "The headlining witness that day was Michael Crichton, whose novel State of Fear involves eco-terrorists conspiring to bring about phony natural disasters and thereby..." |
| This phrasing seems clumsy; Mooney should have written "phony up natural disasters" or something similar. |
| Page 172: | "...and thereby (falsely) convince the world that global warming is underway." |
| Missing space: S/B "under way". |
| Page 181: | The graph on this page has the labels on its curves reversed. |
| The leftmost curve (solid circles) should be labeled "Control (mean = 934.11)" and vice versa. |
| Pages 184-5: | "The man with the red pen was a lawyer who had previously worked for the American Petroleum Institute, now stationed at the Council on Environmental Quality. After the lawyer resigned amid the scandal, he went to work for ExxonMobil." |
| It's curious that Mooney does not name Philip G. Cooney here. With the information he publishes, he must have known the man's name. I suspect some agreement with Rick Piltz, who had not gone public himself with the information. |
| Page 189: | "NOAA and the Department of Commerce had set up a byzantine 13-step review process for the clearance of press releases." |
| Judging by the chart above, it could even be called a 15-step process. |
| Page 226: | "Still, given the fear they inspire and the attention they attract, you could see why those worried about global warming, like Tidwell, might be in a particularly agitated state on the subject of hurricanes." |
| This seems an odd assessment by Mooney. I might even call it unfair. Do not people like William Gray, by asserting at every chance that government scientists are lying for profit, grab the attention of press and public, and thereby inspire their own sort of fear? |
| Page 236: | "The two had different tones. RealClimate warned against attributing any individual storm to global warming but took the general results of the Emanuel and Webster studies very seriously, and scathingly criticized Gray; while Pielke generally took a more sympathetic approach to the hurricane specialists..." |
| Punctuation or usage: S/B either "scathingly criticized Gray;" or "scathingly criticized Gray, while". |
| Page 240: | "...its great advance was to hone in on these particular zones..." |
| S/B "home in on". |
| Page 244: | "...and once again called for the admiral's resignation." |
| Capitalization: S/B "the Admiral's". |
| Page 271: | "By then, however, journalists [...] had amplified personal battles and honed in on scientific disagreements..." |
| Word choice: S/B "homed in on". |
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