In the eye of the storm

摘要

Chris Mooney's follow-up to his The Republican War on Science (Basic Books, 2005) is a reconnaissance flight into the turbulent debate over a link between hurricane activity and global warming. The flight log is compelling enough for Hollywood. It records a clash between the empiricist climate scientist William Gray (think Ian McKellen) at Colorado State University and the theoretician Kerry Emanuel (think Tom Hanks) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Journalist Mooney has a scriptwriter's flair for pitting his protagonists against each other and dishing the historical and methodological back story in vivid prose: "If we're really making the deadliest storms on Earth still deadlier, it will represent one of humanity's all-time greatest foot-shooting episodes."