Extreme Weather: Understanding the Science of Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Floods, Heat Waves, Snow Storms, Global Warming and Other Atmospheric Disturbances [Hardcover]

I just finished reading a new book by H. Michael Mogil titled "Extreme Weather". Unlike many weather books which focus on a dynamic approach (highs, lows, jet streams) to explain weather this book looks at extreme weather by event type and discusses the processes and history behind them. By "extreme" I'm talking about tornadoes, ice storms, flooding, lightning, droughts and so on. The book includes stunning photographs and clear illustrations. Some of the events mentioned are as recent as this year --which for me made the book even more relevant and fun to read.
What I really found interesting about the book is the way Mogil looks at weather extremes within the context of today's global warming discussion --something in the news every day and now even more controversial due to Al Gore's announced Nobel Prize. He doesn't outright deny the existence of global warming and our impact on the environment but rather he illustrates how factors such as long-term climate changes (our coming out of a mini ice age), relatively short weather record-keeping history, the media's preoccupation with hype and sensationalism, and people's selective memory of significant events all conspire to influence our perception. This can lead some people to believe we are in an immediate "crisis". Mogil shows how the media likes to say things like "this is the heaviest snowfall in 10 years" --something which certainly sounds extreme in the short-term but in terms of long-term weather it's probably a relatively common event. He also shows how factors such as the media's incorrect use of the term "normal" (as opposed to the more correct term "average") make extremes (which are in fact a natural range of conditions) seem even more extreme and unusual. For instance, when we say the "normal" high for today is 60 degrees and the actual high reaches 80 there's a tendency for people to say "wow, something is really wrong!" Yet in fact though this book we discover that the high temperature on this day, throughout recorded history, may have ranged from 40 to 100 degrees! Thus the average figure of 60 degrees is meaningless and misleading and the figure of 80 degrees may not be as extreme as we think.

While extreme deviations from the climatic average may be rare they don't all necessarily occur because of human influence. Factors such as improved real-time TV reporting of things like as tornadoes, brush fires, and hurricanes all bring these naturally occurring events to the forefront. The book shows how recent events such as California's brush fires, hurricanes like Katrina, and the drought in the southeast aren't necessarily more intense (in a physical sense) than past "extreme" events but rather it's their impact on people which is greater as a result of where we choose to live, how we construct our homes, and how densely we are populated. This subtle point can lead people to confuse the effects of an event with the physical intensity of an event. Mogil illustrates how easy it is to claim everything is the result of global warming when in fact many of the extreme variations can be explained by other factors --many which predate the industrial revolution.

The last chapter of the book really summed things up foe me. In fact I thought it might have made a better introduction than a conclusion. While I personally believe we humans are warming the planet I agree with Mogil that the dire predictions are probably overdone. Although our study of hyper-long climate histories through techniques such as ice core drilling and fossil stratification gives us general information about average temperature, precipitation, atmospheric gas content, and plant life, these records cannot speak for individual record events such as tornadoes, floods, droughts, and heat waves --the extreme weather-- which may have occurred throughout history. For all we know the massive EF5 tornadoes we have today may pale in comparison with tornadoes that occurred 50,000 years ago. We just don't know. In short, Mogil cautions readers not to automatically attribute extremes in weather to man-made global warming and encourages them to continue seeking and evaluating new information.

After reading this book I haven't changed my mind about our need to cut down on pollution. I haven't changed my mind that we are affecting our environment in a negative way. I also haven't changed my mind about the need for our country move away from foreign oil and our seemingly endless desire to use guns to solve problems rather than our brains. I do feel however, that I am in a better position to analyze what I'm being fed by the media and to consider that my short time on this planet is just a blink of an eye in terms of geologic time and weather history. While I still plan to purchase an electric car in 2009 I no longer feel compelled to sell my house in Oklahoma under the looming threat that it will soon be under water when the polar ice caps melt!

Mogil's graphics and photos are very good, as are his explanations of atmospheric phenomena. My main gripe with this book is his quite obvious bias that the concern over the human impact on climate change is overdone. He acknowledges his skepticism about the human impact on climate and then seeks to present a presumably objective analysis of weather extremes. However, in several chapters, he uses quotes from his own writing or comments to support chapter themes. In the space of 4 paragraphs [p. 83 and 84] on the relative incidence of hurricanes, he uses the phrase "flies in the face of" claims of increased hurricane danger. His satisfaction in finding a counter argument is quite obvious. This is not good objective scientific writing. Rather than objectively evaluate the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]report or the IPCC analysis, Mogil uses counter arguments about the relative frequency extreme weather incidents to downplay the importance of human impact on climate. On page 33, Mogil writes "...people think climate change can be determined by recent extreme events." However, much of the book is devoted to just that--an analysis of extreme events, as is evident in the title.

For a far better analysis of climate change, I recommend Richard Somerville's "The Forgiving Air."[[ASIN:1878220853 The Forgiving Air: Understanding Environmental Change, Second Edition]

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