Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them

Superstorms, hurricanes, typhoons, and spiraling freak weather: the fallout of global warming is a real-life natural thriller, as captured in Porter Fox's urgent and stunning story of chasing the world's most devastating storms.

Here is the story of the largest storms on earth and how those storms are growing bigger and stronger. The tale of extreme weather doesn't begin with floods, fires, or even the air that carries this change to our lives. It begins with the ocean. Oceans create weather, climate, floods, droughts, and most of the geophysical fallout of global warming. Exactly how, award-winning writer Porter Fox contends, depends on invisible ocean currents, planetary cycles just now being defined, and processes in the deep ocean that may well have already saved us from the worst effects of the climate crisis. In an attempt to avert a coming age of superstorms, sea level rise, and catastrophic warming, scientists followed the lead of a college drop-out-turned-maverick sailor and storm-chaser; a Romanian refugee turned BBC radio host turned circumnavigating mapmaker; and an audacious new attempt to study storms above as well as deep below the ocean depths, using drones.

Throughout Category Five, Fox shadows these explorers, scientists, oceanographers, and weather forecasters in an attempt to understand, forestall, and possibly harness the awesome power of our oceans.

Publisher: Little Brown and Company
Published: 09/03/2024
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780316568180


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 06/15/2024
Publishers Weekly 07/08/2024

About the Author
Porter Fox was born in New York and raised on the coast of Maine. He is the author of The Last Winter, and Northland. He lives, writes and edits the award-winning literary travel writing journal Nowhere in upstate New York. He teaches at Columbia University School of the Arts and is a MacDowell Fellow.