In the mail: my friend Chris Mooney’s new book Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. I’ll have more to say once I’ve read it, but the initial reviews are superb — here’s a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly:

Having witnessed Katrina’s devastation of his mother’s New Orleans house, science writer Mooney (The Republican War on Science) became concerned that government policy still ignored worst-case scenarios in planning for the future, despite that unprecedented disaster. He set out to explore the question of whether global warming will strengthen or otherwise change hurricanes in general, even if it can’t explain the absolute existence, attributes, or behavior of any single one of them. Since storm research’s early 19th-century inception, Mooney found, there has been a split between those who believed the field should be rooted in the careful collection of data and observations (e.g., weathermen) and those who preferred theory-based deductions from the laws of physics (e.g., climatologists). Whirling around this longstanding antagonism is a mix of politics, personalities and the drama of these frightening storms. The urgency and difficulty of resolving the question of global warming’s existence, and its relationship to storms, has only heated things up. Mooney turns this complicated stew into a page-turner, making the science accessible to the general reader, vividly portraying the scientists and relating new discoveries while scientists and politicians change sides—or stubbornly ignore new evidence. Mooney draws hope from some researchers’ integration of both research methods and concludes that to be effective, scientists need to be clear communicators.

And here’s what I wrote about Mooney’s first book, The Republican War on Science:

TRWOS takes a deeply reported and researched look at how conservatives are using PR to confuse debate over science and science policy on issues ranging from evolution to global warming to embryonic stem cell research.

…The problem Chris addresses is that PR has shown political organizations how to manipulate public debate – by creating confusion over known facts and accepted conclusions, which are amplified by journalists who play by the “he said,” “she said” conventions of “objective” journalism… And because corporations and the religious right have a shared interest in fighting back against the conclusions of scientists on a variety of issues, legions of conservative think tanks and faux-scientists are now waging a well-funded war to muddy the waters and promote their pre-defined conclusions.

TRWOS is a detailed takedown of this massive effort to distort and politicize science. Even if you don’t agree with Mooney’s politics, you should read this book.