Galactic Interactions

Read this book.

First and formost for a book review: Storm World is a good read. You will not find yourself bogged down or forcing yourself to push through a book that's "good for you." You will keep reading because you will want to know more.

As for the book itself: Mooney clearly has a point of view in the book, and does not hide it. However, that point of view is considered based on the evidence, and he also admits that it is not exactly the same as the point of view he expected to have when starting research for the book. This is not a polemic, it is not a "the sky is falling, we're all gonna die!" rant about hurricans and global warming. Even if you are one who is inclined to doubt all of that, I strongly encourge you to consider reading this book.

The book is really about two things. First, it's a historical and present account of our increasing understanding of just what hurricanes are, including that there still is a lot about them that we don't understand. Second, it's an examination of the scientific process which is in many ways more honest and true to reality than many of the sugar-coated versions of the scientific process that we hear.

At times, I thought that this book could be subtitled "Scientists Behaving Badly." The book is full of tales of scientists personally attacking other scientists— magnified all the more because that is the sort of thing that the media loves to latch on to, blowing it out of proportion. However, the subtitle "Scientists Behaving Badly" really would not be appropriate for this book. While many of the scientists in this book make questionable decisions as people, what is absent from this book is any tales of scientific misconduct. Yes, some of the scientists have accused other scientists of ethical lapses, but Mooney does not see any of them of having ethical lapses. Even those scientists who have come to different conclusions about global warming than most of us are portrayed as ethical scientists with integrity by Mooney. This is one of the most refreshing things about this book. Too often, when you read a non-fiction book, those who are on the "other side" come out looking like villains. Science does progress despite the acrimony and personal conflicts. The process is not pleasant, and some end up suffering greatly, but ultimately it does work.

Don't get me wrong: there are clear and unabashed villains in this book, but they are not the scientists; they are the bureaucrats who interfere with the scientific process, to the dismay of all of the scientists portrayed in the book. But even the most irrascable and controversial scientist in this book is one whom Mooney explicitly admires.

Mooney does a good job of portraying how different scientific philosophies and approaches can lead to different conclusions— and tracing that back through a century of research about hurricanes. Indeed, another subtitle for the book might be "a clash between empiricism and modelling." Even there, however, Mooney comes to the conclusion that both approaches are utterly essential for science. From the earliest days of trying to understand the dynamics of hurricanes, it becomes clear that the empiricists and the modellers each had a piece of the picture right, and their mistake was in seeing the two in conflict rather than trying to figure out how to reconcile the two.

Regarding the connection between global warming and hurricanes, Mooney makes several important points that too often are simply impossible to portray in the either-or, black-and-white, defeate-the-enemy soundbyte tone that permeates political debate today. There is a lot of subtlety. Yes, we don't really know if we've already seen an upturn in hurricane intensity because of human-induced globaly warming, but it remains a possibility. It's a strong possibility that things will get worse in the future because of that... and, thus, we should be planning for it, even if we admit that we're not certain about it. Too often one side says, "you don't really know this will happen, so why must we spend all that money?" That leads the other side to overselling the evidence as a way of fighting back. We need to learn how to deal with scientific uncertainty as a fact of life, and to plan for things that have a reasonable probability without later condemning the scientists who made predictions that do not come to pass.

Mooney also makes the very clear point that even if it is true that the overall number and/or intensity of hurricanes have already been affected by human-induced global warming, it is impossible to say that any one individual hurricane was "caused" by global warming. Hurricanes happen! There are many causes to them. Global warming may well cause an increase in the intensity of hurricanes, but you can have a Category 5 hurricane without global warming. Once again, those who would see action on the possibility that global warming is threatening us through hurricanes oversell the evidence; global warming did not cause Katrina. Unfortunately, those on the other side latch on to the absurdity of this to dismiss the connection altogether. The subtlety of increased risk does not sell well in a soundbyte political debate.

I would love to see everybody in the world read this book. Not only, or even not primarily, because of the thoughtful treatment of an issue that should concern us all (the connection between hurricanes and global warming). But, rather, because it is a good exploration of how we should be dealing with figuring out what is most likely to be true by looking at scientific "consensus," and how science really does work and progress when it appears dysfunctional or contradictory to the outside observer. Too many treatments of science oversimplify the connection between theory and experiment, and how easy the process of "falsification" is. Too many treatments of science make it appear that all ethical scientists will agree when the results of an experiment or observation indicate that their position is wrong. In reality, the results of experiment are rarely so obvious, and often ethical scientists with different approaches will disagree for a long time. The way science is described in this book is much more the way science works in the real world than the way many of us claim it works when trying to explain it to the general populace.

(Note: Chris Mooney is one of the co-bloggers of The Intersection, anther blog (much more popular than this one!) hosted at scienceblogs.com. He's recently been blogging about some of the huge hurricanes of the current season, Dean and Felix.)