Category Five

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.

• “In order to learn about the superstorms that are reshaping everything we think we know about life on planet earth, Porter Fox turns to those who know the ocean best, the sailors and scientists who have spent most of their lives in conversation with sea. With muscular, captivating prose, he carries readers into the dead center of our ongoing planetary tumult, asking how does one survive the unthinkable and also what previously unimaginable worlds might these tempests make possible?”
  Elizabeth Rush, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalists THE QUICKENING and THE RISING
• “By combining gripping accounts of sailing voyages through raging storms with fascinating background on how climate scientists are studying extreme weather, Fox delivers a report that’s as entertaining as it is informative…Filled with enlightening climate science and exciting adventure writing, this thrills.”
  Publishers Weekly (starred review)
• "Captivating and lively. . . Suitable for the general reader or the environmentalist, Category Five is essential reading for anyone concerned about extreme weather and its impacts."
  Maren Ostergard, Booklist