Bøger af Porter Fox

For readers of THE PERFECT STORM and BLUE LATITUDES, recast for our era of rapid ecological transformation, comes an urgent, stirring amalgam of climate writing, history, adventure story, and fascinating personal memoir. The story of extreme weather doesn't begin with heat waves, floods, fires, or even the air that carries this change to our lives. It begins with the oceans. Oceans create weather, just as oceans have shaped the arc of human civilization and the genesis and the growth of nations throughout history. The secret to understanding the frightening effects of climate change, award-winning writer Porter Fox contends, is in understanding how major changes in the oceans radically affect climate, hurricanes, droughts, and most of the geophysical fallout of global warming. To understand how we can live through the coming age of superstorms, scientists have followed the lead of a college drop-out-turned-maverick sailor and storm-chaser; a Romanian refugee turned BBC radio host turned circumnavigating mapmaker, Jimmy Cornell; and an audacious new attempt to study storms above as well as deep below the ocean depths, using drones. Category Five revolves around Fox's time shadowing these mavericks and seeking out myriad scientists, oceanographers, and weather forecasters who are working with them, all in an attempt to understand and forestall -- and just maybe harness -- the awesome power of our oceans. Along the way, Fox takes us through the history of oceans and climate, and back into his own youth as the son of a celebrated boat builder -- aboard a boat his father constructed.

"As the planet warms, winter is shrinking. In the last fifty years, the Northern Hemisphere lost a million square miles of spring snowpack and in the US alone, snow cover has been reduced by 15-30%. On average, winter has shrunk by a month in most northern latitudes. In this deeply researched, beautifully written, and adventure-filled book, journalist Porter Fox travels along the edge of the Northern Hemisphere's snow line to track the scope of this drastic change, and how it will literally change everything--from rapid sea level rise, to fresh water scarcity for two billion people, to massive greenhouse gas emissions from thawing permafrost, and a half dozen climate tipping points that could very well spell the end of our world. This original research is animated by four harrowing and illuminating journeys--each grounded by interviews with idiosyncratic, charismatic experts in their respective fields and Fox's own narrative of growing up on a remote island in Northern Maine."

A gripping blend of narrative travelogue, history and climatology set against the planet's disappearing snow line and rendered by one of the foremost climate reporters.

Recommended by the New York Times Holiday Books Guide A quest to rediscover America's other border-the fascinating but little-known northern one.