New Book Examines How Climate Change Fuels Hurricanes

Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them , the new book from author and former POWDER masthead member Porter Fox, begins with a near-disaster.

Fox, then a young sailor, is caught near the shores of New England by a sudden line squall that plunges him and his vessel into the frigid water. While Fox ultimately survived the encounter, he writes that such outbreaks of violent oceanic weather haunted him for much of his young life.

Category Five centers on one arresting message—climate change has thrown delicate natural systems out of balance, generating destructive sea-born superstorms—but Fox, perhaps surprisingly given his chosen subject matter, didn't embark on the yearslong writing and reporting project in pursuit of bad news.

"I kind of had enough of reading about the doom and gloom, of writing about the doom and gloom, and I found some incredible facts that showed how close we actually are to fully understanding [climate change] and even finding a way out," Fox told me.

Plenty of things to be deeply concerned about still exist among these silver linings, and Fox is unflinching in their telling. "As with most things climate-related in this era, the worst is yet to come," he noted in the book's prologue. One vivid description of the year 2100 carefully constructed by Fox depicts ultra-intense Category 6 storms and deserts spreading across the West. In this version of the future, Miami no longer exists.

While writing Category Five , Fox surveyed explorers, scientists, oceanographers, and weather forecasters, a varied roster that included the likes of John Kretschmer, an open-ocean sailor who, over the years, began to notice changes in the meteorological baseline. Storm seasons had shifted, and trade winds were behaving differently than they once had. One vignette featuring Kretschmer sees a hair-raising ocean journey through the eye of Hurricane Bob, which delivers thrilling and terrifying images of wind-thrashed sailors as they battle against Mother Nature's worst.

That moment—among others—grounds the book as it navigates the complex linkages between the ocean and atmosphere. To understand a hurricane, you have to feel it. Fox takes us there.

Several interwoven threads guided Fox towards the creation of Category Five . Or, as he wrote, "The story wrapped itself around me from a very young age, and the only way out was to tell it."

Sailing runs in Fox’s blood. His father, Crozer, was a shipbuilder. Until the age of 21, Fox earned his keep by sailing and working on boats in various capacities, which led him on journeys up and down the East Coast, where his relative storm sailing inexperience collided with unforgettable, mettle-testing weather.

Then, skiing proved too difficult to ignore, and Fox immersed himself in the mountains of Jackson Hole, temporarily leaving the ocean behind. He worked at Jackson's local newspaper and enlisted at POWDER . While skiing and sailing may seem like distinct sports, Fox points out that they share a fundamental similarity: without cooperation from the natural elements, you're dead in the water—or left without any snow to ski. Wintertime dry spells and windless patches of ocean are close cousins.

"So much of what I've done, and I think a lot of POWDER readers as well, is highly dependent on weather and climate," said Fox. "The things I naturally want to write about that I spend most of my time doing—skiing and sailing and stuff like that—[are] changing so quickly that it would be hard to tell a story these days without talking about climate change."

So, Fox began telling those stories. Two of his previous books, like Category Five , tangled with the consequences of a warming Earth. DEEP , Fox's first work, chronicles skiing’s history and presents the climate change risks the sport faces.

Fox credits his time at POWDER as a pre-authorship proving ground that equipped him with the skills necessary to craft these extended narratives. When he first began retelling his journeys to far-flung ski locales, he'd try to cram too many stories into one article, creating what he now considers unfocused products. Obviously, Fox has surmounted that hurdle—he's published numerous books, after all—but he readily admits that when he's in the throes of producing a new project, things can still get a bit messy, sort of like the whirling tempests that occupy the pages of Category Five.

"I wish I had a really ironed-out process," Fox laughed. "I have it in my mind, but when I look at my desk, it looks like a five-year-old has scribbled on every piece of paper in my office." As our brief conversation wound down, I wondered if Fox, after all his time speaking with experts in the mountains and on the ocean, had advice for concerned outdoors people. The climate is in rough shape, which could jeopardize the pursuits, like skiing, that so many of us live for.

I asked for the purpose of conducting an interesting interview, but I also hoped for an answer that might assuage my personal concerns. As a member of Gen Z, I’ve spent most of my life being assailed by depressing climate reports. An Inconvenient Truth came out while I was in elementary school. Things have only gone downhill since then. In response to my question, Fox delivered some of that good news he'd dredged up while writing Category Five , pointing out that if carbon emissions are addressed head-on, the geophysical fallout of climate change could level off.

"If people put their nose to the grindstone and said, 'All right, let's do this, this is the plan,' you'd be amazed. We're talking decades that we could reverse climate change," he said. “I was under the assumption that we were in for centuries of momentum of climate change and that we'd already crossed the tipping point, and it really wasn't even worth trying, and that's not the case at all.”

Stacked against the seemingly insurmountable political odds—which Fox himself acknowledged—such outcomes might appear fanciful. But awareness is the first step. To defeat your enemy, you have to know your enemy. Category Five, which provides a succinct look at our changing world that’s simultaneously entertaining, informative, and frightening, nudges that dial just a bit further.

Category Five is available at most major booksellers.

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