“Category Five” is an important addition to the literature on climate change. But it would have been far better if Porter Fox didn’t bury the lede amongst ephemera.
We may soon have a new category for hurricanes, and that’s bad news
NONFICTION: “Category Five” says those catastrophic events are commonly being eclipsed, because of climate crisis.
For the Minnesota Star Tribune
August 27, 2024 at 12:30PM
He touches all the important bases. Yes the oceans are warming, which is important in several obvious — and not so obvious — ways. Rising water temperatures create ideal conditions for severe weather events. In fact, Fox suggests there will soon be a need to create a “category six” for hurricanes, because the top current category for winds topping 157 miles per hour — five — is eclipsed so often.
By the year 2100, he writes, “crop failure, food and freshwater scarcity, and the spread of infectious disease around the world will be rampant.”
And that is only the tip of the melting iceberg. Coastal cities will be under water. So will many island nations and “a third of Japan, the Philippines, eastern China, Vietnam, South Korea and Taiwan.”
It’s enough to make me glad I’m old.
Less obvious — or at least less well known — is that oceans, mostly in the northern latitudes, produce oxygen and reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by 50%. But warming decreases the water’s ability to do all that.
Fox visits several scientists, working on projects to gather information about the ocean — 75% of which is still unexplored — and hopefully come up with ways to turn things around. But, universally, they tell Fox their efforts are hampered by a lack of funds. Realistically, no scientist is ever going to say they have enough grant money, but their complaint that the bulk of federal spending is on space-based research rather than oceans seems legitimate.
All of that makes up (I’m guessing) less than half the book. Elsewhere, he spends time with John Kretschmer and Jimmy Cornell, world-renowned sailors who talk about their experience navigating in serious weather. Fox, a sailor himself, is a really good writer and this portion of the book is exciting in an “A Perfect Storm” kind of way. But their observations about changing currents altering the way they sail are just that: observations, not science.
Similarly, a chapter about U.S. Adm. William Halsey losing several ships to a World War II-era storm is interesting, but distracting. And frankly, unless you are a sailor, so is Fox’s lengthy description of a trip he took from the Gulf of Maine, where he grew up, to Woods Hole, in Massachusetts.
As chilling as the book is, this lack of focus curtails its impact.
Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them
By: Porter Fox.
Publisher: Little, Brown, 271 pages, $30.
St. Paul writer Kao Kalia Yang has won four Minnesota Book Awards and was recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts.
