Are hurricanes getting stronger? Has Al Gore vanquished the climate change skeptics?
“Storm World” author Chris Mooney discusses the heated scientific debates about global warming. By Katharine Mieszkowski Jul. 16, 2007 | Science writer Chris Mooney grew up in New Orleans. Just 100 days before Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, he sounded the alarm in the pages of the American Prospect about the Big Easy’s extreme vulnerability to a major storm. Katrina even swamped his own mother’s home in the Lakeview neighborhood. But you won’t find Mooney, author of “Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics and the Battle Over Global Warming,” joining the chorus blaming the devastation and deaths in New Orleans on climate change. As Mooney reports in “Storm World,” many scientists believe a warmer world is likely to make hurricanes on average more intense, and some even argue that we’re already seeing those effects. Yet, the leap from those premises to “Global warming drowned New Orleans!” is the sort of slipshod, unscientific reasoning that makes Mooney bristle. In “Storm Worl
