Storm World by Chris Mooney

Author:Chris Mooney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mariner Books

Severe Tropical Cyclone Monica just north of Australia on April 23, 2006, possibly the most intense storm ever observed in the Southern Hemisphere.

Image credit: Naval Research Lab

April 24 was the day Monica made landfall in Australia’s Northern Territory, west of the Aboriginal township of Maningrida (sparing Darwin another blow). It also happened to be the day William Gray was slated to appear before a crowd of scientists at the Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology conference in Monterey, California. As per the e-mail dialogue several months earlier, Gray had been removed from the panel debate scheduled to occur the next evening, but he had submitted a paper to present instead. The online write-up suggested it would be a full-on attack on the theory of human-induced global warming.

Earlier in the day, meteorologist David Nolan of the Rosentiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at the University of Miami, who sometimes collaborated with Emanuel, had presented perhaps the scariest idea yet about the relationship between hurricanes and the climate system. Using a computer model, Nolan and Emanuel explored the possibility of “spontaneous” genesis of tropical cyclones in a warmer world (perhaps one that had been sufficiently heated thanks to an enhanced greenhouse effect). The scientists accepted the view, dating at least back to the work of Riehl, that hurricane development must be sparked by an independent disturbance. But they suggested that this constraint, while important in our present climate, might not always exist in the future, and might not have existed in previous warmer eras of Earths history. In a hot enough world, seas conducive to hurricanes might stretch much farther pole-ward, into regions where the Coriolis force deflects winds more strongly than it does nearer to the equator (the effect of the Earths rotation increases towards the poles). This might allow hurricanes to come together from “random convection” and thus—it went without saying—occur far more frequently and in locations where we are unaccustomed to seeing them in the current climate.

Nolan didn’t have the misfortune of having to compete head-on with Gray’s speech later that afternoon. Former NOAA Hurricane Research Division director Hugh Willoughby, however, wasn’t so lucky. As Willoughby ruefully recalls, “I sure knew who the people who were interested in my work were. All six or seven of them.” It certainly seemed as if a large proportion of the more than 550 scientists on hand for the conference—many more than would have attended the same event in the decades before hurricane research became sexy—had piled in to hear the grand old man of tropical meteorology.

For the assembled scientists—who, just like crowds of hurricane preparedness experts, liked a little entertainment now and again—Gray didn’t disappoint. He started with a slide in black and red type, set against a light green background:

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