Category Five

Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them

By: Porter Fox

Narrated by: Jeremy Arthur

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.

Excellent explication of complex concepts

Weaving sailing and science together really worked. A good mix of facts and explanations with insights into the personalities involved.

Excellent overview of climate change

What I liked about this book was what it covered concerning the energy associated with climate change. It literally covered how it starts in the oceans and that’s where all the energy is being held.

Boring

I could not finish this audiobook. The narrator almost put me to sleep. Too much personal information, not enough about the storms.