<b>Chris Mooney '95 "Storms" New Orleans with His Latest Book</b>

Chris began his talk by thanking “Isidore Newman School and its fine teachers who taught me how to think, and almost as important, how to write.”

He went on to say that his new book is “less argumentative” than his first book, The Republican War on Science.

Chris explained how he came to write the book – how as a college student, he noted his family having to evacuate New Orleans more and more often, and that got him thinking about his hometown’s vulnerability. Once Hurricane Katrina hit, forcing his family to hole up in his Washington, D.C. apartment, he began to really look into the links between global warming and the monster storms of 2005. What he found was a political and scientific firestorm. “Science got swallowed by the media and politics” as hurricanes became the news of the day, he said. There was “an extraordinary scientific battle taking place” over whether this link existed. The question remains unanswered, but Chris pointed out that even if the storm patterns are not changing, “the ones hitting us now are creaming us.”

Therefore, it is necessary to boost our defenses – strengthen the levees, improve evacuation procedures, rewrite building codes. “It is fundamentally irresponsible not to think about what the worst-case scenario might be,” he said.