Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them

by Porter Fox

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316568210
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	09/03/2024
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook

About the Author

Porter Fox was born in New York and raised on the coast of Maine. He is the author of The Last Winter, and Northland. He lives, writes and edits the award-winning literary travel writing journal Nowhere in upstate New York. He teaches at Columbia University School of the Arts and is a MacDowell Fellow.

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/08/2024

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. Agent: Duvall Osteen, UTA. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

In order to learn about the superstorms that are reshaping everything we think we know about life on planet earth, Porter Fox turns to those who know the ocean best, the sailors and scientists who have spent most of their lives in conversation with sea. With muscular, captivating prose, he carries readers into the dead center of our ongoing planetary tumult, asking how does one survive the unthinkable and also what previously unimaginable worlds might these tempests make possible?”—Elizabeth Rush, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalists THE QUICKENING and THE RISING

“By combining gripping accounts of sailing voyages through raging storms with fascinating background on how climate scientists are studying extreme weather, Fox delivers a report that’s as entertaining as it is informative…Filled with enlightening climate science and exciting adventure writing, this thrills.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the Publisher

2024-05-17
An examination of the causes of the ever growing number of savage storms.

Fox, author of Northland and The Last Winter, purports to investigate how the proliferation of increasingly dangerous, unpredictable storms is driven by changes in ocean temperatures due to climate change. In particular, there has been a marked increase in Category 5 storms, those with winds of at least 190 miles per hour. Porter is a seasoned writer, and this is an intrinsically important issue, so it’s unfortunate that the narrative continually veers off course. Fox, who has written extensively about wilderness excursions, is an experienced sailor, and much of the text involves his adventures. He devotes considerable time to the mechanics of sailing and the various characters he has met along the way. Some of this material is interesting, especially for fellow sailors, but these discussions are tangential to the theme of ocean temperatures and climate change. A few of Fox’s detours are even more unrelated, such as the chapter about the role a typhoon played in a World War II naval battle. When the author sticks to the topic of climate change, he delivers a variety of useful information, but his tone is often overly alarmist. Fox does provide some interesting nuggets, including the chronic shortfall of funding for ocean research, the innovative use of drones to study storms, and the possible need for a Category 6 designation. By 2030, he writes, “Category 6 typhoons will have devastated a third of Japan, the Philippines, eastern China, Vietnam, South Korea, and Taiwan.” However, many readers may grow weary of digging out the relevant bits. If only the author brought the same level of focus to this book that he did to The Last Winter.

Porter offers intermittent illumination, but a lack of focus leads to a middling book about a crucial subject.

Kirkus Reviews