Books about climate change are a dime a dozen these days, but a new one by Porter Fox, who grew up on the water and whose father built boats for a living, treads new ground, writes Associated Press reviewer Rob Merrill.
This cover image released by Little, Brown and Company shows “Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed From Them” by Porter Fox. This cover image released by Little, Brown and Company shows “Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed From Them” by Porter Fox. This cover image released by Little, Brown and Company shows “Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed From Them” by Porter Fox.
“Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them” is a mouthful of a title, but there’s a lot packed into its 254 pages. Part memoir, part travelogue and part scientific reportage, it’s stuffed with statistics that the cynical will say add up to one conclusion: This planet’s doomed.
That’s because he weaves all the science talk into a personal narrative, telling his own story about growing up on an island halfway up the Maine coast with a father who built sailboats for a living. “The sea was an enchanted forest when we were kids,” he writes. “We built shelters out of driftwood on a tiny island in the middle of the harbor, planted a flag, and declared it ours.” Fox opens the book with a prologue about being caught in a storm while sailing as a young man.
The book then introduces readers to a variety of “salty mariners” who share with Fox their lessons learned about navigating storms, their research into what causes them, and their predictions for the future of the climate. The jargon may sometimes have non-weather and boating enthusiasts Googling things like “katabatic squalls,” “violent sirocco” or “mizzen,” but Fox grounds his writing with good stories, either from his own life, or told to him by the experts he interviews.
In the end, Fox argues, it’s water that might actually save us, if the world would just start listening to oceanographers. The world’s oceans contain “95% of livable space on Earth,” and while their warming waters wreak all sorts of havoc on this planet’s weather, they are also the “largest carbon sink on the planet.” It’s that sense of possibility, the “mystery of the deep,” that will give some hope.
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