From Booklist:
In this captivating and lively text, Fox, a travel writer, explains how little is known about the ocean, how it contributes to climate change, and how its power might be utilized to help solve the climate crisis. With clear and vivid writing and an urgent tone, the author conveys the history of the ocean’s impact on civilization and the critical role that oceans play in creating weather and distributing heat, precipitation, and carbon. He interviews a fascinating cast of characters, including sailors and researchers from around the world, sometimes joining them while they explore, and other times traveling to interviews in a boat built by his father, deftly interweaving his own personal sailing stories. The text switches seamlessly back and forth in time, describing events such as a storm that devastated fleets in the U.S. Navy during WWII, to a contemporary conversation with the head of Saildrone, a company that builds pilotless oceangoing vehicles that can sail into hurricanes and collect data. Suitable for the general reader or the environmentalist, Category Five is essential reading for anyone concerned about extreme weather and its impacts.
From Publisher’s Weekly (starred review):
By combining gripping accounts of sailing voyages through raging storms with fascinating background on how climate scientists are studying extreme weather, Fox (The Last Winter) delivers a report that’s as entertaining as it is informative. He notes that for decades, sailors have been raising the alarm that centuries-old rules of thumb for navigating the sea are losing their predictive value as climate change transforms the ocean. This can lead to dangerous consequences, Fox contends, providing a harrowing description of how in 1991, sailor John Kretschmer endured 80 mile-per-hour winds and torrential rain after getting caught in a category three hurricane despite sailing outside “typical hurricane generation zones” near Bermuda. Fox explains that as CO2 warms the atmosphere, the heat intensifies the process by which energy is transferred from the ocean to the air, which in turn exacerbates the differences in air pressure that generate wind and make severe storms more common. Exploring scientific efforts to better understand how global warming is changing the ocean, Fox details oceanographer Adrienne Sutton’s work with Richard Jenkins’s Saildrone company to develop unmanned vessels capable of taking CO2 and temperature measurements even in the middle of a hurricane. Filled with enlightening climate science and exciting adventure writing, this thrills.