A lot of regular ScienceBlogs visitors have read Chris Mooney's first book, The Republican War on Science. Mooney is back with another glimpse into the charged, multilayered, and dishonesty-plagued interplay between science and policy with Storm World, an opus about how climate science and hurricance science -- fields which until recently managed to function largely independently of one another, at least in the U.S. -- have seen its chief figures and proponents spar, cooperate, and evolve from pure info-seekers into sometimes-unwilling players to the media in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The Republican War on Science certainly incited a great many of its readers to new heights of anger and passion about the shameless abuses of the Bush administration across multiple environmental and industrial concerns. But Storm World is more tightly focused, dealing as it does with one basic subject -- the increasing danger of hurricanes in the Atlantic basin and, in the context of the most up-to-date scientific findings, what measures American policymakers are ultimately responsible for taking as a result. Because of this, and owing to its programmed focus on not only the workings but the often-quirky and bombastic personalities of the most prominent storm scientists in the world, the book reads almost like a series of parallel biographies or even a well-researched novel. I finished it in two days.

Mooney does a superb job of blending history with the presentation of ample amounts of hurricance science, which is not surprising since he is, after all, a trained journalist with an established passion for technical details. I have had more than a passing interest in windstorms in recent years; I moved to South Florida in August 2004 and was immediately greeted by four major hurricanes in a span of barely more than a month (Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne), two of which affected me directly if not severely. In October 2005 Hurricane Wilma ripped through Boca Raton, felling trees, tearing huge signs off overpasses, felling every hanging traffic light inthe city and knocking out power for almost two weeks.

It was during this period of reading by candlelight and whiling away the hours on my balcony with a displaced college student and a German Shepherd for company that I gave considerable thought to just how underprepared Florida -- and the U.S. as a whole -- is for a truly huge hurricane. As Mooney notes, Katrina, for all of the damage it did to New Orleans, actually missed the city. Wilma was a Category 1 or 2 storm when it blazed a trail across the Everglades and through Florida's most populous areas, yet did $26 billion in damage. The consequences of a Cat 5 storm scoring a direct hit on Miami or Fort Lauderdale are almost unthinkable, but as New Orleans native Mooney implores us to remember, we have no choice.

Mooney's job in writing this book is to get us all to think. No one tome can undo decades of poor planning, bad-decision-making, government shenanigans, lax building-code enforcement, citizen apathy and poor judgment and greed on the part of land developers. But if any one easily digested narrative can at least get us all thinking about action and consequences, it's Storm World.