Most hurricane damage is caused by flooding from storm surges.

I really wanted to see the science bloggers panel at Yearly Kos, but Jill was on a panel scheduled at the same time, and so I decided to see hers instead. Tough decisions abounded at Yearly Kos, but that was the worst, because I think that science blogging has a great deal of potential to help scientists communicate better with the public. So I can’t report on the panel, but I did read Chris Mooney’s book Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming this past week and can report back on that. For those who don’t know, Chris is a science writer and blogger who writes for The Intersection, and he’s primarily interested in hurricane science and in creating relationships between scientists and the public. This book addresses both issues and well.

The book might seem dry on the surface, since it’s ostensibly about the scientific debate over whether or not global warming is affecting hurricane frequency and intensity, but it’s actually a captivating read, because this debate has been dramatically intensified by the fact that there’s a lot of laymen invested in both sides of the debate for blatantly partisan reasons. But I hate that word “partisan”, because it implies that Mooney is running with a six of one, half a dozen of another story, and he’s not. Being no fool, Mooney supports the environmentalists that are in the right about global warming, and his quarrels with them are about tactics, not content, and while he’s sympathetic to the fact that some global warming “skeptics” aren’t bad people or necessarily bad scientists, he also uses scare quotes around the word “skeptic” to remind the audience that skepticism comes from a pro-science attitude and anyone who dismisses the overwhelming evidence out of hand is no skeptic.

Hurricanes are an interesting angle of attack. As Mooney points out, even though there’s other consequences of global warming that are more severe and more certain than intensified hurricanes, the rapid-fire destructive potential of hurricanes tends to draw public attention. With 50% of Americans living within 50 miles of a coastline, intensified hurricanes are an irresistible ploy to get people to care about global warming. I’d add, though he doesn’t go into this, that the relationship between hurricanes and global warming is also very easy to convey to people who don’t get science too well. The theory behind why global warming will intensify and increase hurricanes is easy to convey in a simplified form. Basically, hurricanes get their power from the heat in the ocean. You don’t even have to explain the mechanics of it because most people are aware that hurricanes form in warm weather and break up once they hit land and are deprived of their energy source. If ocean heat is the fuel of hurricanes, then the more heat in the oceans, the more fuel for the hurricanes. The drama and the simplicity of it are arresting, even as there are other potential consequences of global warming that are much more alarming (widespread drought, for instance, is far fucking scarier if you think about it).

Issues arise because hurricane intensity is hard to measure and the tools are too recent to really detect trends based on empirical evidence alone. As Mooney tells it, the initial contentious debate in the scientific community over hurricanes and global warming had more to do with different approaches—the empirical one favored by meterologists who are mostly intent in tracking trends that allow them to create immediate predictions and the climate modeling one favored by climate scientists who are interested in figuring out what would happen to our planet if factors in it changed, such as temperature changes from global warming. Overall, the differences between these two groups seem like they could be worked out by combining outlooks some and moving forward—most intellectually honest scientists are willing to admit that global warming is real even if they disagree on what its effects could be—but one meterologist by the name of Bill Gray has managed to muck the whole situation up, by extrapolating his lack of empirical evidence for the effect of global warming on hurricanes into a full-scale attack on the idea that global warming could even be real. From Mooney’s account, Gray’s grudge against computer modeling probably has more to do with his hatred of the theory of global warming than any other factor. That said, his veering-on-totally-irrational hatred of computer modeling has clouded his judgment to the point that he’s become a stooge for the polluting industry and the American right wing.

The emotional center of the book is the story of how Bill Gray lost his way. Mooney demonstrates a lot of respect and interest in Gray’s career as a hurricane specialist, a man who helped point to the various cycles in weather that give us El Nino blips, a man whose empirical methods have helped create a superior system for predicting hurricanes. Gray’s a smart guy, no doubt, but his intellectual blind spot of irrational loathing for computer modeling has led him to abandon all pretense of scientific willingness to adjust your opinions based on evidence. Instead, he’s allowed the red carpet treatment given to him by right wingers who are only using him as an excuse to ignore global warming to harden his opinions against global warming because he personally doesn’t see a trend within his small sphere of research on hurricanes. Mooney sets you up to really appreciate Gray’s lifelong accomplishments, which makes it all the more pathetic to see him performing like a dancing pony for Republican ideologues whose respect for any science is based strictly upon partisan loyalties, and who don’t know about or care about niceties like the different between empirical science and more theory-heavy science. Gray’s got a lot of genuinely interesting scientific experience under his belt and is even an old-fashioned science-atheist, but nowadays he’s playing house with the very same people who believe that they can safely ignore reams of evidence for evolution and claim that a story about a snake in a garden should be treated as more likely because it soothes their egos more. Gray pisses a lot of people off with his ridiculous denials of global warming, but in Mooney’s hands, his story becomes something of a tragedy—a once-great man reduced to partisan circus tricks to distract and confuse the public.

Does global warming increase the intensity of hurricanes? The answer, after reading Mooney’s book, is, “We don’t know, but it’s likely.” It’s worth reading his book to learn in layman’s terms about all the various research done into figuring out hurricanes work, but the short answer is that ocean heat is fuel for hurricanes, everyone knows it, and thus it’s hard to believe that increasing the amount of ocean heat wouldn’t make hurricanes more intense. But it’s not exactly relevant in terms of public policy, either. What policy makers need to know is that global warming needs to be slowed/stopped for a variety of reasons and that hurricanes are going to happen no matter what and coastal cities need to be heavily fortified against them, global warming or not. The scientific debate about intensity has some relevance, but it’s not priority compared to these two indisputable points. Centering the debate around hurricanes is tempting, but creates potential for conservatives to bring doubt into the debate, doubt they can use to smear the concept of global warming and unfairly imply that there’s any real dispute over whether or not it’s real and happening. (There’s not.)

I recommend reading this book, because Gray is a central figure in creating doubt about global warming in the minds of the public, and Mooney clearly lays out why Gray is not to be trusted on this. In debating people who want to cast doubt on global warming for partisan reasons, it’s important to know who they’re leaning on, and you’ll get that out of this book. In my non-debate with my father months about about the reality of global warming, he kept mentioning some meteorologist who was against the theory and I had no idea who he was talking about, but now I realize that he was probably referring to Bill Gray, who’s a favored pet on the right. Now I can articulate clearly why Gray is way off the mark and has made himself something of a joke, and I can even color it with pity for the man, who’s ending a distinguished career with his move towards becoming a stooge for the right.