Book Review: ‘Category Five’ examines superstorms amid compelling personal memoir

I graduated from Middlebury College with Porter Fox just over 30 years ago. We weren’t friends, but it was a small campus and everyone knew something about everybody else. I knew he sailed and wore L.L. Bean like a native Mainer. I didn’t know that he’d spend a good chunk of his career as a journalist documenting the effects of climate change.

“Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them” is a mouthful of a title, but there’s a lot packed into its 254 pages. Part memoir, part travelogue and part scientific reportage, it’s stuffed with statistics that the cynical will say add up to one conclusion: This planet’s doomed. But while the numbers don’t lie and humanity is certainly going to exceed its self-imposed temperature targets to halt global warming, Fox has written a book that doesn’t read like the sky is falling.

That’s because he weaves all the science talk into a personal narrative, telling his own story about growing up on an island halfway up the Maine coast with a father who built sailboats for a living. “The sea was an enchanted forest when we were kids,” he writes. “We built shelters out of driftwood on a tiny island in the middle of the harbor, planted a flag, and declared it ours.” Fox opens the book with a prologue about being caught in a storm while sailing as a young man. “I did indeed grow up working on boats, but I never learned about storms, how to avoid them, or how to sail through them. They haunted me for most of my young life.”

The book then introduces readers to a variety of “salty mariners” who share with Fox their lessons learned about navigating storms, their research into what causes them, and their predictions for the future of the climate. The jargon may sometimes have non-weather and boating enthusiasts Googling things like “katabatic squalls,” “violent sirocco” or “mizzen,” but Fox grounds his writing with good stories, either from his own life, or told to him by the experts he interviews. “I will always live by the sea,” he recalls his father telling him when he was just a boy, then rhapsodizes about “the blank slate that the ocean represents, the lack of rules and obligation,” that calls to men and women who spend their lives on the water.

In the end, Fox argues, it’s water that might actually save us, if the world would just start listening to oceanographers. The world’s oceans contain “95% of livable space on Earth,” and while their warming waters wreak all sorts of havoc on this planet’s weather, they are also the “largest carbon sink on the planet.” It’s that sense of possibility, the “mystery of the deep,” that will give some hope. And it’s books like Fox’s — climate science wrapped in a compelling narrative — that can hopefully change habits, one reader at a time.

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